Verb form derived from common earlier Germanic languages
The Germanic language family is one of the language groups that resulted from the breakup of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It in turn divided into North, West and East Germanic groups, and ultimately produced a large group of mediaeval and modern languages, most importantly: Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (North); English, Dutch and German (West); and Gothic (East, extinct).
The Germanic verb system lends itself to both descriptive (synchronic) and historical (diachronic) comparative analysis. This overview article is intended to lead into a series of specialist articles discussing historical aspects of these verbs, showing how they developed out of PIE, and how they came to have their present diversity.
All Indo-European verbs that passed into Germanic as functioning verbs were strong, apart from the small group of irregular verbs discussed below. The...
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...
In the Germanic languages, weak verbs are by far the largest group of verbs, and are therefore often regarded as the norm (the regular verbs). They are...
conjugation of Germanic strong verbs such as sing/sang/sung. While Germanic umlaut has had important consequences for all modern Germanic languages, its...
tense. The vast majority of verbs in all Germanic languages are weak; the remaining verbs with vowel ablaut are the strong verbs. The distinction has been...
a limited number of verbs, or if it requires the specification of more than one principal part (as with the German strong verbs), views may differ as...
West Germanic is the preservation of grammatischer Wechsel in most verbs, particularly in Old High German. This implies the same for West Germanic, whereas...
with OHG lembir The development of Class III weak verbs into a relic class consisting of four verbs (*sagjan "to say", *hugjan "to think", *habjan "to...
Irregular verbs typically followed more regular patterns at a previous stage in the history of English. In particular, many such verbs derive from Germanic strong...
strong verbs to become weak. As German is a Germanic language, the German verb can be understood historically as a development of the Germanicverb. The...
the term "phrasal verb" primarily to verbs with particles in order to distinguish phrasal verbs from verb phrases composed of a verb and a collocated preposition...
primary underived verbs and so any derived verbs lacked perfect forms altogether. The latter verbs formed the base of the Germanic weak verbs and did not inherit...
weak verbs. As the weak past participle was formed with the Proto-Indo-European suffix *-tos, the assimilation could have occurred in all verbs with stems...
syllables; heavy syllables were not changed. Compare, for example, the Germanicverbs *fūlijaną 'to defile' and *fuljaną 'to fill, to make full', which appear...
only four verbs. By the Old English period, new class I weak verbs had stopped being produced, but so many had been coined in Proto-Germanic that they...
Gothic verbs have the most complex conjugation of any attested Germanic language. Most categories reconstructed for the Proto-Germanicverb system are...
the Germanicverb system (notably in strong verbs), or the merger of the vowels a and o qualities (ə, a, o > a; ā, ō > ō). During the Pre-Germanic linguistic...
Verbs constitute one of the main parts of speech (word classes) in the English language. Like other types of words in the language, English verbs are...
advice. Modal verbs generally accompany the base (infinitive) form of another verb having semantic content. In English, the modal verbs commonly used...
embedded verb second. The embedded verb second in these kinds of languages usually occur after 'bridge verbs'. (Bridge verbs are common verbs of speech...
The Germanic substrate hypothesis attempts to explain the purportedly distinctive nature of the Germanic languages within the context of the Indo-European...
auxiliary verbs. Below are some sentences that contain representative auxiliary verbs from English, Spanish, German and French, with the auxiliary verb marked...
transitive verbs, some verbs take zero objects. Verbs that do not require an object are called intransitive verbs. An example in modern English is the verb to...
early Germanic languages: dual inflections on verbs, morphological passive voice for verbs, reduplication in the past tense of Class VII strong verbs, clitic...