Germanic Strong Verb

Germanic Strong Verb

In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is one which marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel (ablaut). The majority of the remaining verbs form the past tense by means of a dental suffix (e.g. -ed in English), and are known as weak verbs. (A third, much smaller, class comprises the preterite-present verbs, which are continued in the English auxiliary verbs, e.g. can/could, shall/should, may/might, must.) In modern English, strong verbs are verbs such as sing, sang, sung or drive, drove, driven, as opposed to weak verbs such as open, opened, opened or hit, hit, hit. The "strong" vs. "weak" terminology was coined by the German linguist Jacob Grimm, and the terms "strong verb" and "weak verb" are direct translations of the original German terms "starkes Verb" and "schwaches Verb".

In Proto-Germanic, strong and weak verbs were clearly distinguished from each other in their conjugation, and the strong verbs were grouped into seven coherent classes. Originally, the strong verbs were largely regular, and in most cases all of the principal parts of a strong verb could be reliably predicted from the infinitive. This system was continued largely intact in Old English and the other older historical Germanic languages, e.g. Gothic, Old High German and Old Norse. The coherency of this system is still present in modern German and some of the other conservative modern Germanic languages. For example, in German, strong verbs are consistently marked with a past participle in -en, while weak verbs have a past participle in -t. In English, however, the original regular strong conjugations have disintegrated, with the result that in modern English grammar, the distinction between strong and weak verbs is much less useful than a distinction between "regular" and "irregular" verbs. The irregular verbs include all the strong verbs, but many weak verbs as well. For example, the verb hold, held, held continues a strong verb, whereas tell, told, told and lead, led, led continue weak verbs, but to a modern speaker without knowledge of the relevant history, the distinction between the two types appears arbitrary.