The forms of the Present were used to indicate actions in Present and Future

Future: Ic nāt hwænne mīne daas āāne bēoþ (Я не знаю, когда мои дни будут окончены)

There was another way to express the future actions: the modal verbs + Infinitive. There were two modal verbs in OE; sculan (must) and willan (want)

e.g. Swā sceal man dōn (The man must act in this way)

The Past tense was used to indicate various events in the Past (including Past Continuous, Past Perfect, Present Perfect)

There were two other grammatical categories in OE: Aspect and Voice. The category of Aspect was expressed by verbs with or without the prefix e (meaning the perfective action)

In OE there were two non-finite forms of the verb: the Infinitive and the Participle.

The Infinitive had no verbal grammatical categories. By the origin it was a verbal noun and had two forms which corresponded to the Nom. and the Dat. cases of nouns.

The Participle was a kind of verbal adjective which was characterized not only by nominal but also by verbal features. Participle 1 (or Present Participle) was opposed to Participle 2 (or Past Participle) through voice and tense distinctions: it was active and expressed present processes while Participle 2 expressed states and qualities from past action and was contrasted to Participle 1 as passive to active. Participle 1 was formed with the help of the suffix –ende. Participle 2 had a stem of its own with the vowel interchange and by the suffix –en, and prefix e-

e.g. Infinitive Participle1 Participle2

bindan bindente e-bunden

Most forms of the OE verb were distinguished with the help of inflectional endings or grammatical suffixes.

The majority of OE verbs fell into two great divisions: the strong verbs and the weak verbs. Besides there were a few verbs which could be put together as minor groups.

All the forms of the verb were derived from stems or principal parts of the verb. The Present tense stem was used in all the Present tense forms, all the forms of the Past tense were derived from the Past tense stems.

The strong verbs formed their stems by means of vowel gradation and by adding certain suffixes. The strong verbs had 4 stems: 2 stems in the Past Tense for the 1^st and 3d person singular Ind. Mood and other for the other Past tense forms. The strong verbs in OE are usually divided into 7 classes. The classes differ in the series of root-vowels used to distinguish the four stems. There were about three hundred strong verbs

The weak verbs derived their Past tense stem and the stem of Participle 2 from the Present tense stem with the dental suffix –d or –t. The number of weak verbs was numerous. There were three classes of them.

Minor groups of verbs differed from the weak and strong verbs. Some of them combined certain features of strong and weak verbs. The most important group of them is “past-present” verbs. In OE there were twelve past-present verbs, six of them have survived in Modern English: ā, cunnan, cann, dear, sculan, sceal, maan, mæ, mōt (owe, ought, can, dare, shall, may, must). Among minor verbs were several anomalous verbs with irregular forms. Two OE verbs were suppletive: ān (go) and bēon (be).