“Quoth” the raven? The heartwarming tale of a defective verb

amaranthine-ephemerality:

It is one of the most well-known lines English poetry has to offer: “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’” It is an eerie verse found in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, and we all know what the the first word in it means. It’s a weird, extremely uncommon verb in the past tense meaning ‘to say’. Now use the same verb to ask if the raven said “nevermore.” Did the raven… and now most of you - excluding you language and etymology enthusiasts out there - are struggling because you don’t know what the infinitive of quoth is. What has happened?
The English language is fairly old, so it isn’t surprising to find out that many words have died out, i.e. they aren’t in use anymore and can oftentimes not be understood by native speakers. Look, for instance, at the Old English noun costnunge and try to guess what it means. No idea? Maybe the context will help. It can be found in the sentence And ne gelæd ðū ūs on costnunge, found in an OE version of the Lord’s Prayer. It means ‘temptation’, or rather meant that, seeing as it hasn’t been used for a very long time. If you read Middle English versions of the prayer, you’ll see that the noun had already been replaced by a ME form of temptation.
What does this have to do with quoth? Quite a bit, actually, only that it is a far more interesting word. It belongs to a class of verbs we call defective verbs. These are verbs exhibiting an incomplete conjugation, which means the verb doesn’t have a (modern) form for every tense, aspect, mood, or person. Modal auxiliaries are prime examples; take can for example, which has a preterite form, could, but it doesn’t have a present or past participle. The verb must is an even more extreme case as there isn’t even a past form. An example of a lexical defective verb would be beware because bewares, bewared, or bewaring aren’t normally used in present-day English. With quoth, we have the 1st and 3rd person sing. past tense form still being known to speakers, which is rather interesting and unusual, and if it weren’t for “The Raven”, who knows if we would still know about this verb. We also don’t use it anymore unless we want to write a fancy poem with archaic language.
Quoth comes from the ME verb quethen, from OE cwethan. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, all forms of the verb save for the one in question were no longer in use by the end of the 16th century. But why did people stop using the verb? We cannot look into the heads of the people who spoke English a thousand years ago, but one reason is certainly the competition the verb had to face. The most common verbs in Modern English that have the same or a similar meaning are say, speak, and tell. And man, are they common. They were already around in Old English times, when we had secgan, sprecan, and tellan. Believe it or not, it gets even more interesting.
The exact same thing happened in German, another West Germanic language! In Old High German, the verb quedan, cognate with OE cwethan, was still used very frequently, but then it disappeared. Its competitors were the same as in English. In present-day German, we still find sagen (OHG sagēn), sprechen (OHG sprehhan), and (er)zählen (OHG zellen).
It’s the sad little story of a verb we know was once there because of a poem, but that left us a long time ago. Or did it? Turns out the verb actually managed to find a backdoor to stay alive! Maybe you’ve even had it in mind for some time now. The verb I mean is bequeath, a very formal word. All it took for it to survive throughout the centuries was the prefix be-, which also made it gain new meanings, among them the ones the word still has today. The etymology section in the Oxford English Dictionary includes the following sentences:
An ancient word, the retention of which is due to the traditional language of wills. Originally, like its radical cweðan, a strong verb; but having only weak inflection since 1500.
Bequeath is a regular lexical verb whose forms can all be used, and since it turned into a weak verb, the preterite form today is bequeathed, not *bequoth. Let’s see if it’ll manage to stay around in the future. Its odds are certainly much better than those of the word it was derived from, for it has found a comfy place in formal English and legalese, and its competitors aren’t nearly as fearful either. Congratulations. You can now show off in front of your friends when discussing “The Raven” ;)

I think I’d always assumed that quoth was related to quote, but Etymonline says they’re from totally different roots:

late 14c., coten, “to mark (a book) with chapter numbers or marginal references,” from Old French coter, from Medieval Latin quotare "distinguish by numbers, number chapters,“ from Latin quotus "which in order? what number (in sequence)?,” from quot "how many,“ from PIE *kwo-ti-, from pronomial root *kwo- (see who).

Related: last week’s discussion of Indo-European question words, a hilariously anachronistic vlog adaptation of The Raven by shipwreckedcomedy.