| Germanic Weak Verb |
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For comparative purposes we may refer to this generally as a dental, although in some of the languages, including English, /t/ and /d/ are alveolar rather than dental consonants. In English, the dental is a /d/ after a Voiced Consonant or Vowel , and a /t/ after a Voiceless Consonant , though English uses the spelling in
Weak verbs should be contrasted with Strong Verbs , which form their past tenses by means of '' Ablaut ''. All the original Indo-European verbs which came into Germanic as verbs were once strong. However, as the ablaut system is no longer productive, all new verbs in Germanic languages are weak, and the majority of the original strong verbs have become weak by analogy. In some cases a verb has become weak in the preterite but not in the participle, or (rarely) vice versa. These verbs may be thought of as "semi-strong" (not a technical term). Dutch has a number of examples of this:
In the medieval Germanic languages, a number of different classes of weak verbs had to be distinguished, according to the consonants in the stem. In the modern languages, these distinctions have mostly been levelled. The regular weak verbs conjugate as follows: Weak verbs are often thought of as having a regular Inflection , but not all weak verbs are regular verbs; some have been made irregular by Ellipsis or Contraction , such as ''hear ~ heard''; while others are merely irregular due to the eccentricities of English Spelling , such as ''lay ~ laid''. In German, verbs ending in ''-eln'' or ''-ern'' have slightly different inflection patterns. There are many other examples. The Preterite-present Verb s are in a sense weak verbs with very significant irregularities; but usually they are not bracketed under weak verbs. One particularly interesting category of irregular weak verb is the so-called ''rückumlaut'' verb. This is discussed in the article on '' Umlaut '' under the section "''Umlaut'' in Germanic verbs". An original ''-j-'' in the inflection caused the whole of the present stem (including the infinitive) to experience a fronting of the stem vowel, though the past tense retains the back vowel. Another irregularity is a consonant alternation sometimes referred to by the German word ''Primärberührung'', which looks superficially like Grammatischer Wechsel but in fact results from the phenomenon of the Germanic Spirant Law in early Germanic. In effect this is a process of Assimilation of the plosive at the end of the stem caused by contact with the dental suffix. Both ''Rückumlaut'' and ''Primärberührung'' are observable in the verb ''to think'':
Some grammar books use the term "mixed verb" to describe these. This rests on the misconception that these verbs display both '' Ablaut '' and a dental suffix, and are therefore at once strong and weak. But the vowel change is not ''ablaut''. The term " Weak verb" was originally coined by Jakob Grimm and in his sense refers only to Germanic philology. However, the term is sometimes applied to other language groups to designate phenomena which are not really analogous. For example, Hebrew ''irregular'' verbs are sometimes called weak verbs because one of their radicals is weak. For other aspects of the verb in Germanic languages see the overview article Germanic Verb . |