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How did West Germanic past-tense verb forms differ from North Germanic forms?

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Thematic map of Europe displaying the distribution of Germanic languages, with different colors indicating regions where English, German, Netherlandic (Dutch), Frisian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese are spoken. Striped areas mark regions where bilingualism is common, and language regions cover countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and parts of surrounding countries. — West Germanic languages Distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe.

In the context of West Germanic languages, past-tense verb forms differed from North Germanic forms primarily through specific morphological replacements and the treatment of person markers.

A key distinction is that West Germanic languages replaced the inherited second-person singular past-tense forms of strong verbs. For example, while Proto-Germanic used a form like namt ("you took"), which is preserved in Old Norse as namt, West Germanic languages such as Old English (nōme) and Old Saxon or Old High German (nāmi) adopted different endings.12

Additionally, while both groups utilized the dental preterit—a past tense formed by adding a suffix containing a dental or alveolar consonant—to characterize "weak" verbs, the specific evolution of these languages led to distinct grammatical patterns over time. These differences highlight the divergence of West Germanic from the North Germanic branch following the fragmentation of the earlier Northwest Germanic dialect continuum.341