The Fossil in ‘Sing, Sang, Sung’: Ablaut

For native speakers, these forms are often second nature, learned through sheer repetition. But they feel arbitrary. They seem like messy exceptions, little bits of grammatical chaos in an otherwise orderly system. The truth, however, is far more fascinating. These verbs aren’t mistakes or random quirks. They are living fossils. They are echoes of an ancient, elegant system that predates the English language itself, a system known as ablaut.

What on Earth is Ablaut?

Simply put, ablaut is a system where a vowel inside a word’s root changes to show a change in grammatical function. Think of it as grammar happening inside the word, rather than being bolted onto the end. The standard English past tense, the “-ed” suffix (e.g., walk -> walked), is an external change. Ablaut is an internal one.

The classic example is the one we started with:

• Sing (present tense) – uses the vowel /ɪ/
• Sang (past tense) – uses the vowel /æ/
• Sung (past participle) – uses the vowel /ʌ/

The consonants S-N-G stay put, acting as the stable root. The vowel, however, is the moving part, shifting to signal a change in tense. Verbs that follow this ancient pattern are called strong verbs. Verbs that form their past tense by adding a suffix like “-ed” or “-t” (walked, slept) are called weak verbs. The “weak” system is actually the newer, more productive one in English—it’s the default template for new verbs (you wouldn’t say you “glog/glag/glug”, you’d say you “glogged”). But the strong verbs persist, preserving a piece of deep linguistic history.

A Journey 6,000 Years into the Past

To understand where ablaut comes from, we have to travel back in time. Way back. Before English, before Latin, before Sanskrit. We’re going back to around 4500-2500 BCE, to the speakers of a language we now call Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

PIE is the reconstructed ancestor of a vast family of languages, from Hindi and Persian to Russian, Spanish, German, and, of course, English. While we have no written records of PIE, linguists have painstakingly reverse-engineered its features by comparing its daughter languages. And one of its most fundamental features was ablaut.

In PIE, ablaut wasn’t just for tense. It was a core part of how words were formed and related to each other. The system worked on different “grades” of a root vowel, which was almost always an *e*.

• The e-grade (or full grade) was the basic, default state. It often corresponded to the present tense or the basic meaning of a verbal root.
• The o-grade was a “strengthened” form. It could indicate a completed action (which later became the past tense in Germanic languages) or be used to form nouns from a verb.
• The zero-grade was a “reduced” form where the vowel was deleted entirely. This was often used for past participles or in unstressed syllables of a word.

Let’s see how the PIE root *gʷem- (to come) might have worked:

• e-grade: *gʷem-
• o-grade: *gʷom-
• zero-grade: *gʷm-

This single root could spawn a whole family of words. This system was passed down to Proto-Germanic, the direct ancestor of English, and the patterns morphed slightly. The PIE e-grade often became an *i* in Germanic, the o-grade an *a*, and the zero-grade a *u*. Sound familiar?

PIE *sengʷh- (to sing) -> Proto-Germanic -> Old English -> Modern English

• e-grade: *sengʷh- -> *singwaną -> singan -> sing
• o-grade: *songʷh- -> *sangw -> sang -> sang
• zero-grade: *sṇgʷh- -> *sung- -> sungen -> sung

Suddenly, the pattern in sing/sang/sung isn’t random at all. It’s a direct, unbroken line of inheritance stretching back thousands of years. When you use these words, you are using a grammatical tool forged by our distant, prehistoric ancestors.

Ablaut Hiding in Plain Sight

Once you know what to look for, you start seeing ablaut’s ghost everywhere, not just in verb conjugations. It’s a powerful word-formation tool that connects entire families of seemingly disparate words.

Word Families

Consider the PIE root *bʰeydʰ- (to trust, to command, to persuade). Through the magic of ablaut and other sound changes, this one root gives us:

• Bide: from the Old English bīdan, “to wait, to remain”, preserving a form of the original root.
• Abide: adding a prefix, but the root remains.
• Bond: A noun form, likely from an o-grade variant, meaning something that “binds” you in trust.
• Bind: Another related verb with its own ablaut pattern (bind/bound/bound).

Or take the verb to bear (meaning to carry), from PIE *bʰer-. From this one root, we get:

• Bear (the verb) and its past forms bore and born/borne.
• Bier: a frame for carrying a coffin.
• Burden: something that is carried.

This is ablaut in action as a creative force, weaving a web of meaning between words.

The Curious Case of Foot/Feet

What about irregular plurals like foot/feet, goose/geese, and man/men? This isn’t PIE ablaut, but it’s a close cousin that operates on the same principle of internal vowel change. This process is called i-mutation or i-umlaut.

In Proto-Germanic, the plural form of some nouns ended in an “-iz” suffix. The high front vowel /i/ in that suffix “pulled” the root vowel of the word forward in the mouth in anticipation. For example, the ancestor of “foot” was *fōt, but its plural was *fōtiz. Over time, that /i/ caused the /oː/ vowel in the root to shift forward and become /eː/. Eventually, the “-iz” ending disappeared, but the mutated vowel remained, leaving us with the odd pair: foot/feet.

A Fossil Worth Preserving

So, why should we care about this ancient linguistic machinery? Because it reveals the true nature of language: it’s not a static, designed system, but a living, evolving, wonderfully messy organism.

Ablaut is a window into the mind of our ancestors. It shows us a world where grammar was more deeply fused with the sound and shape of the words themselves. It adds a layer of texture and poetry to English that a perfectly regular system would lack. There’s a subtle sonic rightness to drive/drove/driven that drive/drived/drived could never capture.

The next time you’re tripped up by an irregular verb or notice a strange connection between words like bond and bind, take a moment to appreciate it. You’re not dealing with an error or an exception. You’re brushing up against a 6,000-year-old fossil, a piece of verbal DNA that connects you directly to the very roots of your language.