The verb go is highly irregular. Its principal parts are go, went, and gone. The past participle gone does not seem as irregular as the preterit, or simple past tense, went; at least it seems related to the infinitive go. Rather, it is the simple past tense of go that seems entirely out of place, not related at all to the infinitive, save in terms of sense. If went does not seem related to go, it is because it is in no way etymologically related to go. Went comes from wendan in Old English, which is also the source of wend. When someone says that "I'm wending my way home", what he means is "I'm going home." Actually, went is only the second irregular preterit that go has had throughout its history. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), go originally existed only in the present stem; all past forms, such as preterit or past participial, are later additions or modifications. The earliest recorded Old English preterit for gan (whence we get go) is reproduced in the following table with the acute accent representing a long vowel. This is gan conjugated for the preterit. In modern English, it means went.

Contents

1 Old English Preterit 2 Origin of Old English Preterit 3 The Acquisition of a new Preterit 4 Origins of the infinitive 5 Origins of the Past Participle 6 Summary of the main PIE roots

Old English Preterit

Gan (Eng.go)	Singular	Plural
1st Person	éode	éodedon
2nd Person	éodedest	éodedon
3rd Person	éodede	éodedon

Origin of Old English Preterit

When one looks at éode, in all its conjugated forms, it is not surprising to see all the –ds, for these are the familiar Germanic dental suffixes , establishing éode as a preterit. The root itself éo came from the unattested Proto-Germanic *ijjôm. (The Gothic form of this root is iddja) *Ijjôm was itself a past tense form of the PIE root *yâ (go). Specifically, this root was it was either imperfect or aorist. (The aorist aspect expressed momentary action in the past, while the imperfect, continual action in the past). *Yâ itself seems to have come from a PIE form *ei, î, and if this is correct, it would establish a link between the Old English Preterit for go and the Latin îre (go, pres inf.) (which is simply the î from *ei, î followed by a standard Latin infinitive ending, –re). The OED does not discuss this, but the 4th Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary does in its appendix of PIE stems, drawing heavily on Pokorny 's Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (page 293). Incidentally, îre is the source of many English words, words as disparate as introit, preterit, and ambition.

Ambîre means "to go around", and later, the sense was changed to mean "to go around for votes". If someone went around for votes, he was literally ambitus (the past participle), which, through regular processes in Vulgar Latin and Old French became ambitious. Obviously, one who went around for votes would have ambition, desire to succeed, etc.

The Acquisition of a new Preterit

Returning to the etymology of the go, our now-familiar éode became, in ME, variously ȝede, yede, and yode. By the 15th cen. in southern England, wende (wend) had become synonymous with go, but its infinitive and present tense forms had ceased to be in frequent use. With a waning, morphing preterit tense (yode), go was ripe to receive a new preterit, the preterit of wende, which turned out to be the familiar went. In Scotland and in the dialects of northern England, yede was also superceded, but by gaed, which was produced by adding a regular dental suffix to the regional variant of go. Went made it into Standard English because southern England was to become the politically, culturally and economically central region of England in modern British history. An interesting side-note is that Spencer used yede to mean go in some instances, with its preterit form of yode but this was dialectical.

But what was the source of wend, which is itself the source of current preterit form for go? Most directly, wend which came from wendan. Based on numerous Germanic cognates, (particularly Gothic wandjan), the existence of the PIE root *wand is postulated. This root would be the preterit stem of windan. The relationship between windan and wendan needs to be briefly addressed. A note before, though – I will be using OE infinitive forms, though some of the words I will be discussing are not attested and predate OE, and had similar, though not identical, infinitive endings.

The original form from which we get went is windan. This verb is the source of the modern verb, wind, (whose preterit and past participle is wound.) The original preterit of windan was *wand-, and windan had a causative form, wendan (meaning "to cause to wind", or "to cause to become wound"). So, went is derived from wendan, which is itself derived from windan. Let us now investigate the etymology of windan.

Under wand (n.) the Oxford English Dictionary simply states that words like wend, wind, wand, and wander all have a common PIE root, and that this root is related to the idea of turning. (note that – wand originally meant a supple switch, and is related to the word from which whip is derived. The most important IE root (found in Pokorny 3. *er- 1152.) is treated in one of the American Heritage Dictionary's etymological indices under *wer-2. Though this root also carries with it the idea of turning, none of its English descendents are the words for which we are looking. Many turning-related words do come from *wer-2 (which Pokorny calls er-). For instance, we have wrist, wreath, writhe, (all of which involve turning), wring, wrench, and worm are only the most obvious descendents of this root. So, all we can say is that wind is derived from a similar PIE root to *wer-2.

Though it would be nice to know more, we do know that the root beginning in *w- presupposed turning or motion. Though we know to wind is now most frequently used in the context of turning an object (e.g. "She wound the clock.") and above all else, transitively, and though this use is very old, the intransitive usage wind is probably just as old. Though originally wend meant to cause to wind (and the winding often being done in an intransitive sense), due to the similarity of these two words, they have been confused for at least a thousand years, and have thus influenced each other's developments. For much of their histories, wend and wind have had the sense of going, and thus it is not surprising that wend eventually came to have the sense of go.

Origins of the infinitive

Turning once again to the American Heritage's IE roots appendix, we find under the entry ghê- the origin of the infinitive form, go. Ghê- had the sense of "To release, let go; to be released (in the middle voice, this time), go. From ghê, we get the OE gân (to go) and German gehen (which is relatively regular, compared to English go). Though the 1st person present indicative in OE was gá, aside from an unsurprising shift from an a to an o, there has been little change in the infinitive form of this word for its entire history, a very rare thing for such a common word, and one used for so long.

Origins of the Past Participle

The case of gone is a little more difficult. The OE pa. pple. was egán ,but in order to understand fully the history of the pa. pple. we need to look at the now obsolete English verb, gang. Gang means "to walk" or "to go", and is possibly the source of the past participles gone and Germ. gegangen (which means gone). According to this theory, the preterit of a form of gang eventually became past participles in English, German, and other related languages. The question arises of the relationship between gang and gân. The OED proposes five theories. Needless to say, there is little consensus. There is one theory, that if true, would be fascinating. A scholar named Kludge has contented that *ga-îm is the source of both go and gone, and that the î comes from the PIE root *ei-, which, as previously noted, is the source of Latin îre. It would be fascinating if this were true, but it is but one of many theories that have been presented, and there is no scholarly consensus. One interesting theory is that gone and gegangen are both nasalized reduplications of ghê-, and another is that the relationship of stand and stay influenced go and gone very early on.

Summary of the main PIE roots

At last, we see that go (historically, anyway) is derived from at least 3 PIE roots: *ghê (from which we get go, and possibly gone), *ei, î, the source of éonde, and a root beginning in *w- from which we eventually get went, through windan and then wendan. We only use two of the derivatives of these roots today, go and went.