<Tr> <Td> lend </Td> <Td> lent </Td> </Tr> <P> Although modern English has very little affixal morphology, its number includes a marker of the preterite, apart from verbs with vowel changes of the find / found sort, and the great majority of verbs that end in / td / take / ɪd / as the marker of the preterite, as seen in Type I . </P> <P> Can we make any generalizations about the membership of verbs in Types I and II? Most obviously, the Type II verbs all end in / t / and / d /, though that is just like the members of Type I. Less obviously they are all without exception basic vocabulary . Note well that this is a claim about Type II verbs and not a claim about basic vocabulary: there are basic home - and - hearth verbs in Type I, too . But there are no denominative verbs in Type II, that is, verbs like to gut, to braid, to hoard, to bed, to court, to head, to hand . There are no verbs of Latin or (a little harder to spot) of French origin; all stems like depict, enact, denote, elude, preclude, convict are Type I. Furthermore, all novel forms are inflected as Type I: all native speakers of English would presumably agree that the preterites of to sned and to absquatulate would most likely be snedded and absquatulated . </P> <P> The inference from these considerations is that the absence of a "dental preterite" marker on roots ending in apical stops in Type II reflects a more original state of affairs, i.e., that in the early history of the language the "dental preterite" marker was in a sense absorbed into the root - final consonant when it was / t / or / d /; the affix / ɪd / after word - final apical stops then belongs to a later stratum in the evolution of the language . The same suffix is involved in both types, but with a 180 ° reversal of "strategy": other exercises of internal reconstruction would point to the conclusion that the aboriginal affix of the dental preterites was / Vd / (where V = a vowel of uncertain phonetics, and of course an inspection of Old English directly would reveal several different stem - vowels in the mix). In modern formations, it is stems ending in / td / that preserve the vowel of the preterite marker; in an earlier day, odd as it might seem, the loss of the stem vowel had taken place already prehistorically whenever the root ended in an apical stop . </P>

What do you mean by internal reconstruction of a company