Table 10

As seen from the tables the forms of the two participles were strictly differentiated. Participle I was formed from the Present tense stem (the Infinitive without the endings –an, -ian) with the help of the suffix -ende. Participle II had a stem of its own – in strong verbs it was marked by a certain grade of the root-vowel interchange and by the suffix -en; with weak verbs it ended in –d⁄-t (see morphological classification of verbs.) Participle II was commonly marked by the prefix ʒe-, though it could also occur without it, especially if the verb had other word-building prefixes, e. g.

Participles were employed predicatively and attributively like adjectives and shared their grammatical categories: they were declined as weak and strong and agreed with nouns in number, gender and case. Sometimes, however, they remained uninflected. Cf. the following examples:

It is probable that lack of agreement with participles-predicatives and with participles used in predicative constructions after habban ('have') testifies to the gradual transition of these phrases into compound verb forms.