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In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel. The majority of the remaining verbs form the past tense by means of a dental suffix, and are known as weak verbs.
In modern English, strong verbs include sing (present I sing, past I sang, past participle I have sung) and drive (present I drive, past I drove, past participle I have driven), as opposed to weak verbs such as open (present I open, past I opened, past participle I have opened). Not all verbs with a change in the stem vowel are strong verbs, however; they may also be irregular weak verbs such as bring, brought, brought or keep, kept, kept. The key distinction is that most strong verbs have their origin in the earliest sound system of Proto-Indo-European, whereas weak verbs use a dental ending (in English usually -ed or -t) that developed later with the branching off of Proto-Germanic. In modern English, as in all modern Germanic languages, weak verbs outnumber strong verbs.
The "strong" vs. "weak" terminology was coined by the German philologist Jacob Grimm in the 1800s, and the terms "strong verb" and "weak verb" are direct translations of the original German terms starkes Verb and schwaches Verb.
and 25 Related for: Germanic strong verb information
the Germanic languages, a strongverb is a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel. The majority of the remaining verbs form...
All Indo-European verbs that passed into Germanic as functioning verbs were strong, apart from the small group of irregular verbs discussed below. The...
as the norm (the regular verbs). They are distinguished from the Germanicstrongverbs by the fact that their past tense form is marked by an inflection...
Look up strongverb in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Strongverb may refer to: Germanicstrongverb, a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes...
example of the latter is provided by the strong and weak verbs of the Germanic languages; the strongverbs inherited their method of making past forms...
demonstrate suppletion; the verb do; and the defective modal verbs. Many irregular verbs derive from Germanicstrongverbs, which display the vowel shift...
conjugation of Germanicstrongverbs such as sing/sang/sung. While Germanic umlaut has had important consequences for all modern Germanic languages, its...
which is then known as a weak inflection. The term strong was coined with reference to the Germanicverb, but has since been used of other phenomena in these...
Heidelberg: Winter. Bammesberger, Alfred (1996). The Preterite of GermanicStrongVerbs in Classes Fore and Five, in "North-Western European Language Evolution"...
A modal verb is a type of verb that contextually indicates a modality such as a likelihood, ability, permission, request, capacity, suggestion, order,...
tense. The vast majority of verbs in all Germanic languages are weak; the remaining verbs with vowel ablaut are the strongverbs. The distinction has been...
ending. Strongverbs use a Germanic form of conjugation known as ablaut. They form the past tense by changing their stem vowel. These verbs still exist...
paradigm of a Germanicverb. According to Grimm's law, the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiceless stops *p, *t, *k and *kʷ usually became Proto-Germanic *f, *θ...
participle is strongly influenced by the status of the verb at hand. The perfect and the passive participles of strongverbs in Germanic languages are...
irregular verbs, see English irregular verbs. Many of these can be classed as Germanicstrongverbs, such as sing (past sang), while others are weak verbs with...
Appendix:English modal verbs in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to...
following examples, finite verb forms are in bold, non-finite verb forms are in italics and subjects are underlined.) Germanic languages vary in the application...
in the article on uses of English verb forms. The original Proto-Germanic ending of the infinitive was -an, with verbs derived from other words ending in...
Look up weak verb in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Weak verb may refer to: Germanic weak verb, verbs in Germanic languages that form their preterites...
in syntax and verb morphology (for verb morphology in English verbs, Dutch and German, see Germanic weak verb and Germanicstrongverb). Grammatical cases...
traditional grammar of Modern English, a phrasal verb typically constitutes a single semantic unit consisting of a verb followed by a particle (examples: turn down...
Old Norse has three categories of verbs (strong, weak, & present-preterite) and two categories of nouns (strong, weak). Conjugation and declension are...
the suffix should have undergone Grimm's Law and become *-þ in Germanic whenever the verb stem did not end in an obstruant. However, it remained as *-t...