Preterite-present
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The
Germanic language family The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...
is one of the language groups that resulted from the breakup of
Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...
(PIE). It in turn divided into
North North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating Direction (geometry), direction or geography. Etymology T ...
,
West West or Occident is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sunset, Sun sets on the Earth. Etymology The word "west" is a Germanic languages, German ...
and
East East or Orient is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from the fa ...
Germanic groups, and ultimately produced a large group of mediaeval and modern languages, most importantly:
Danish Danish may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Denmark People * A national or citizen of Denmark, also called a "Dane," see Demographics of Denmark * Culture of Denmark * Danish people or Danes, people with a Danish a ...
,
Norwegian Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe * Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway * Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including ...
, and
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
(North);
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...
,
Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...
and
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...
(West); and
Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
(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.


Verb types

The Germanic verb system carried two innovations over the previous
Proto-Indo-European verb Proto-Indo-European verbs reflect a complex system of morphology, more complicated than the substantive, with verbs categorized according to their aspect, using multiple grammatical moods and voices, and being conjugated according to person, nu ...
system: # Simplification to two tenses: present (also conveying future meaning) and past (sometimes called "preterite" and conveying the meaning of all of the following English forms: "I did, I have done, I had done, I was doing, I have been doing, I had been doing"). # Development of a new way of indicating the preterite and past participle, using a dental suffix. Later Germanic languages developed further tenses periphrastically, that is, using auxiliary verbs, but the constituent parts of even the most elaborate periphrastic constructions are still only in either present or preterite tenses (or non-finite forms, compare ''I would have been doing'', an English conditional perfect progressive with ''would'' in the preterite, the other three parts being non-finite). Germanic verbs fall into two broad types, strong and weak. Elements of both are present in the preterite-present verbs. Despite various irregularities, most verbs fall into one of these categories. Suppletive verbs are completely irregular, being composed of parts of more than one Indo-European verb. There is one verb ( *''dōną'' 'to do') that is in a category of its own, based on an Indo-European "athematic" form, and having a "weak" preterite but a "strong" passive participle.


Strong verbs

Strong (or vocalic) verbs display vowel gradation or
ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German ''Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
, that is, the past tense is marked by a change in the vowel in the stem syllable. Examples include: Modern English: * fall – fell – fallen * sing – sang – sung Old English: * – – – (to fall) * – hēt – hēton – (ge)hāten (to be called) Old High German: * (to fall) * (to be called) In the older languages, these verbs may also be reduplicating, that is, the past tense forms add a prefix with the same consonant as the first consonant of the stem syllable. An example in Gothic is (to have). In Proto-Germanic, consonant alternations known as ''
grammatischer Wechsel In historical linguistics, the German term ' ("grammatical alternation") refers to the effects of Verner's law Verner's law describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the vo ...
'' developed, as a result of
Verner's law Verner's law describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives , , , , , following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives , , , , . The law was ...
. This involves an originally regular change in the consonant at the end of the stem syllable. An example in modern Dutch is (to lose) These are the direct descendants of the verb in
Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...
, and are paralleled in other
Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
Examples include: * (Greek: to leave) * (Latin: to cheat) All Indo-European verbs that passed into Germanic as functioning verbs were strong, apart from the small group of irregular verbs discussed below. The preterite of strong verbs are the reflex of the Indo-European perfect. Because the perfect in late Indo-European was no longer simply
stative According to some linguistics theories, a stative verb is a verb that describes a state of being, in contrast to a dynamic verb, which describes an action. The difference can be categorized by saying that stative verbs describe situations that are ...
, but began to be used especially of stative actions whose source was a completed action in the past (e.g., Greek), this anterior aspect of it was emphasized in a couple of Indo-European daughter languages (e.g., Latin), and so it was with Germanic that the perfect came to be used as a simple past tense. The semantic justification for this change is that actions of stative verbs generally have an implied prior inception. An example of this is the typical and widespread PIE stative 'I know': one who "knows" something at some point in the past "came to know" it, much as the natural inference from noting someone in a sitting state is that a prior action of becoming seated occurred. The classical/
Koine Greek Koine Greek (; Koine el, ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, hē koinè diálektos, the common dialect; ), also known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek or New Testament Greek, was the common supra-reg ...
perfect is essentially an early step in the development of the stative aspect to a past tense, being a hybrid of the two that emphasizes the ongoing (present/stative) effects of a past action (e.g., 'I have left"). Apparently it was this latter anterior respect that is responsible for the Indo-European perfect showing up as a past tense in Germanic, Italic, and Celtic. The Indo-European perfect took o-grade in the singular and
zero grade In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
in the dual and plural. The Germanic strong preterite shows the expected Germanic development of short ''o'' to short ''a'' in the singular and zero grade in the plural; these make up the second and third principal parts of the strong verb. The Indo-European perfect originally carried its own set of personal endings, the remnants of which are seen in the Germanic strong preterite. The reduplication characteristic of the Indo-European perfect remains in a number of verbs (seen most clearly in Gothic), a distinction by which they are grouped together as the seventh class of Germanic strong verbs.


Weak verbs

Weak (or consonantal) verbs are those that use a dental suffix in the past or "preterite" tense, either or . In
Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branc ...
, such verbs had no
ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German ''Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
—that is, all forms of all tenses were formed from the same stem, with no vowel alternations within the stem. This meant that weak verbs were "simpler" to form, and as a result strong verbs gradually ceased to be
productive Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proces ...
. Already in the earliest attested Germanic languages, strong verbs had become essentially closed classes and almost all new verbs were formed using one of the weak conjugations. This pattern later repeated itself—further sound changes meant that stem alternations appeared in some weak classes in some daughter languages, and these classes generally became unproductive. This happened, for example, in all of the West Germanic languages besides
Old High German Old High German (OHG; german: Althochdeutsch (Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 750 to 1050. There is no standardised or supra-regional form of German at this period, and Old High ...
, where umlaut produced stem alternations in Class III weak verbs and, as a result, the class became unproductive and most of its verbs were transferred to other classes. Later, in
Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English p ...
, stem alternations between long and short vowels appeared in Class I weak verbs (examples are "meet" vs. "met" and "hear" vs. "heard"), and the class in its turn became unproductive, leaving the original Class II as the only productive verb class in Modern English. In Proto-Germanic, there were five main classes of weak verbs: *Class I verbs were formed with a suffix -j- (-i- in the past), e.g.,
Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
"to set" (
Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
), sandjan "to send" (Old English ), "to seek" (Old English ). As shown in the Old English cognates, the -j- produced umlaut of the stem vowel in languages other than Gothic and then disappeared in most verbs in old Germanic languages other than Gothic and
Old Saxon Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German (spoken nowadays in Northern Germany, the northeastern Netherlands, southern Denmark, the Americas and parts of Eastern Europe). It i ...
. (It also resulted in
West Germanic gemination West Germanic gemination was a sound change that took place in all West Germanic languages around the 3rd or 4th century AD. It affected consonants directly followed by , which were generally lengthened or geminated in that position. Because of Si ...
in some verbs, and palatalization of
velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the velum). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive an ...
s in Old English.) *Class II verbs were formed with a suffix -ō- (extended to -ōja- in the
Ingvaeonic languages North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic , is a postulated grouping of the northern West Germanic languages that consists of Old Frisian, Old English, and Old Saxon, and their descendants. Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Ge ...
), e.g., Gothic "to anoint," Old English , compare "to salve." *Class III stative verbs were formed with a suffix that was -ja- or -ai- (later -ē-) in the present and was null in the past, e.g., Old English "to have" ← , past tense "I had." The West Germanic languages outside of Old High German preserved this conjugation best, but in these languages the conjugation had become vestigial and had only four verbs in it. In other languages, it was merged with the Class III factitive verbs (see below) and significantly modified, e.g., Gothic , past tense ; Old High German , past tense . *Class III factitive verbs were formed with a suffix that was -ā- or -ai- in the present and -a- in the past. This class merged with the Class III stative verbs in Gothic, Old High German and (mostly)
Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...
, but vanished in the other Germanic languages. *Class IV verbs were formed with a suffix -n- (-nō- in the past), e.g. Gothic "to become full", past tense . This class vanished in other Germanic languages; however, a significant number of cognate verbs appear as Class II verbs in Old Norse and as Class III verbs in Old High German.


Preterite-presents

The so-called preterite-present verbs are a small group of anomalous verbs in the
Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...
in which the present tense shows the form of the strong preterite. The preterite of the preterite-present verbs is weak. As an example, take the third-person forms of modern German "to be able to." "can, am/is able to" (present tense) displays the vowel change and lack of a personal ending that would otherwise mark a strong preterite. "could, was able to" (preterite) displays the dental suffix of the weak preterites.


Sources

According to one "widely-held view," the preterite-present verbs are derived from the Proto-Indo-European perfect. The PIE perfect usually developed into a Germanic past tense. In the case of the preterite-presents, however, it evolved into a present-tense verb. Hence, the preterite-presents have a present-tense meaning on the one hand and a form that resembles that of a preterite or past-tense verb on the other. Reconstructions of this process differ depending on how they interpret the PIE perfect. An example is the PIE perfect *. It is the ancestor of the Germanic preterite-presents meaning "(s/he) knows," represented here by Gothic : * If the PIE perfect was stative-resultative, * can be glossed as "knows as a result of having seen" (the state of knowing results from a past action, i.e., seeing). In , the meaning "knows" was retained as a present tense. The reference to the past ("having seen") was lost semantically, but it was preserved etymologically in the past-tense form of the preterite-present. However, it is hard to identify similar combinations of past action and present state for some of the other preterite-presents. (The different semantic facets involved in this example can be observed in
Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...
and
Vedic upright=1.2, The Vedas are ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism. Above: A page from the '' Atharvaveda''. The Vedas (, , ) are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the ...
"I know" and in Latin 'I saw' robably_an_old_root_
robably_an_old_root_aorist">aorist.html"_;"title="robably_an_old_root_aorist">robably_an_old_root_aorist_compare_also_Russian_language.html" "title="aorist.html" ;"title="aorist.html" ;"title="robably an old root aorist">robably an old root aorist">aorist.html" ;"title="robably an old root aorist">robably an old root aorist compare also Russian language">Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
[to see] and [to know]). * If the PIE perfect was purely stative, * can be glossed as "knows" (the state of knowing). The meaning "knows" was carried over as a present tense into . In this understanding, the preterite-presents constitute a retention of the non-past nature of the Indo-European perfect. Many linguists, however, do not share this view: "most accounts of the PIE perfect do not treat it as purely stative". One response to these and other problems has been to argue that the preterite-presents are instead the descendants of a separate PIE stative category, from which the stative-resultative PIE perfect was also derived. This approach allows the preterite-presents to be treated as purely stative in origin without depriving the PIE perfect of a temporal element.


Preterite-presents in Proto-Germanic

The known verbs in
Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branc ...
(PGmc):


Ablaut

The present tense has the form of a vocalic (strong) preterite, with vowel-alternation between singular and plural. A new weak preterite is formed with a dental suffix. The root shape of the preterite (in zero-grade) serves as the basis for the infinitive and past participle, thus Old English infinitive and past participle ; this contrasts with all other Germanic verb types, in which the basis for those forms is the present stem.


Personal endings

For the most part, the personal endings of the strong preterite are used for the present tense. In fact, in West Germanic the endings of the present tense of preterite-present verbs represent the original Indo-European perfect endings better than that subgroup's strong preterite verbs do: the expected Protogermanic strong preterite second-person singular form ending in ''-t'' was retained rather than replaced by the endings ''-e'' or ''-i'' elsewhere adopted for strong preterites in West Germanic. The endings of the preterite (except for ) are the same as the endings of Class I weak verbs.


Subsequent developments

In modern English, preterite-present verbs are identifiable by the absence of an -s suffix on the third-person singular present tense form. Compare, for instance, ''he can'' with ''he sings'' (preterite: ''he sang''); the present paradigm of ''can'' is thus parallel with the past tense of a strong verb. (See
English modal verb The English modal verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality (properties such as possibility, obligation, etc.). They can be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participle ...
.) In modern German there is also an
ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German ''Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
shift between singular } (I can) and plural (we can). In the older stages of the Germanic languages (
Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
,
Middle High German Middle High German (MHG; german: Mittelhochdeutsch (Mhd.)) is the term for the form of German spoken in the High Middle Ages. It is conventionally dated between 1050 and 1350, developing from Old High German and into Early New High German. High ...
) the past tense of strong verbs also showed different ablaut grades in singular and plural. Many of the preterite-present verbs function as
modal verb A modal verb is a type of verb that contextually indicates a modality such as a ''likelihood'', ''ability'', ''permission'', ''request'', ''capacity'', ''suggestion'', ''order'', ''obligation'', or ''advice''. Modal verbs generally accompany the b ...
s (auxiliaries which are followed by a
bare infinitive Infinitive (abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is deri ...
, without "to" in English, and which convey
modality Modality may refer to: Humanities * Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations * Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales * Modalitie ...
) and indeed most of the traditional modal verbs are preterite-presents. Examples are English ''must'' and ''shall/should'', German (may), (ought), (like), and (must). The early history of ''will'' (German ) is more complicated, as it goes back to an Indo-European
optative mood The optative mood ( or ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope regarding a given action. It is a superset of the cohortative mood and is closely related to the subjunctive mood but is distinct from the desiderative mood. ...
, but the result in the modern languages is likewise a preterite-present paradigm.


Suppletive verbs

A small number of Germanic verbs show the phenomenon of
suppletion In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even ...
, that is, they are made up from more than one stem. In English, there are two of these: ''to be'' and ''to go''. The copula (the verb ''to be'' and its equivalents in the other languages) has its forms from three or four IE roots (, and possibly . The phenomenon of verb paradigms being composites of parts of different earlier verbs can best be observed in an example from recorded language history. The English verb ''to go'' was always suppletive, having the past tense in Old English (this is believed to represent the original Proto-Germanic situation "to go" ~ "I went", "we went"). In the 15th century, however, this was replaced by a new irregular past tense ''went''. In fact ''went'' is originally the past tense of the verb ''to wend'' (compare ''wend''~''went'' with ''send''~''sent''); today ''wend'' has the regular past tense ''wended''. In most other modern Germanic languages the verb "go" takes its preterite from the Proto-Germanic verb "to walk" (e.g., German ; Dutch ; Swedish ).


IE optative

A special case is (to want, will), which has its present tense forms from the IE
optative The optative mood ( or ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope regarding a given action. It is a superset of the cohortative mood and is closely related to the subjunctive mood but is distinct from the desiderative mo ...
. Today, the optative survives in the
subjunctive The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of the utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude towards it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality ...
of the Germanic languages. In Faroese,An Introduction to Modern Faroese, pp. 136-137
/ref> it is confined to the present tense and used only as a conjunctive.


Regular and irregular verbs

When teaching modern languages, it is usually most useful to have a narrow definition of a "regular verb" and treat all other groups as irregular. See the article
irregular verb A regular verb is any verb whose conjugation follows the typical pattern, or one of the typical patterns, of the language to which it belongs. A verb whose conjugation follows a different pattern is called an irregular verb. This is one instance ...
. Thus for example, most text books for learning English or German treat all strong verbs as irregular, and only the most straightforward weak verb counts as regular. In historical linguistics, however, regular patterns are examined diachronically, and verbs tend only to be described as "irregular" when such patterns cannot be found. Most of the supposedly "irregular" Germanic verbs belong to historical categories that are regular within their own terms. However, the suppletive verbs are irregular by any standard, and for most purposes the preterite-presents can also count as irregular. Beyond this, isolated irregularities occur in all Germanic languages in both the strong and the weak verb system.


See also


General

*
Verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
*
Regular verb A regular verb is any verb whose conjugation follows the typical pattern, or one of the typical patterns, of the language to which it belongs. A verb whose conjugation follows a different pattern is called an irregular verb. This is one instance ...
*
Irregular verb A regular verb is any verb whose conjugation follows the typical pattern, or one of the typical patterns, of the language to which it belongs. A verb whose conjugation follows a different pattern is called an irregular verb. This is one instance ...
* Copula *
Principal parts In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are those forms that a student must memorize in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its forms. The concept originates in the humanist Latin schools, where students learned verbs ...
*
Infinitive Infinitive (abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is deri ...
*
Past tense The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some hav ...
*
Present tense The present tense (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to locate a situation or event in the present time. The present tense is used for actions which are happening now. In order to explain and understand present ...
*
Future tense In grammar, a future tense (abbreviated ) is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. An example of a future tense form is the French ''aimera'', meaning ...
*
Suppletion In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even ...


Specialist subsidiary and related articles

*
Germanic weak verb In the Germanic languages, weak verbs are by far the largest group of verbs, are therefore often regarded as the norm (the regular verbs). They are distinguished from the Germanic strong verbs by the fact that their past tense form is marked by ...
*
Germanic strong verb In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is a verb that 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 kn ...
*
Indo-European copula A feature common to all Indo-European languages is the presence of a verb corresponding to the English verb ''to be''. General features This verb has two basic meanings: *In a less marked context it is a simple copula (''I’m tired''; ''That ...
*
Go (verb) The verb ''go'' is an irregular verb in the English language (see English irregular verbs). It has a wide range of uses; its basic meaning is "to move from one place to another". Apart from the copular verb ''be'', the verb ''go'' is the only Engli ...


The verb in particular Germanic languages

*
English grammar English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, Sentence (linguistics), sentences, and whole texts. This article describes a generalized, present-day Standard English ...
*
English verbs 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 not heavily inflected. Most combinations of tense, aspect, mood and voice are expressed perip ...
*
English irregular verbs The English language has many irregular verbs, approaching 200 in normal use—and significantly more if prefixed forms are counted. In most cases, the irregularity concerns the past tense (also called '' preterite'') or the past participle. T ...
* Wiktionary appendix: Irregular English verbs *
German verbs German verbs may be classified as either ''weak'', with a dental consonant inflection, or ''strong'', showing a vowel gradation (ablaut). Both of these are regular systems. Most verbs of both types are regular, though various subgroups and anoma ...
* :de:Liste starker Verben (deutsche Sprache) * :de:Liste starker Verben (bairische Sprache) *
Dutch conjugation This article explains the conjugation of Dutch verbs. Classification of verbs There are two different ways in which Dutch verbs can be grouped: by conjugational class and by derivation. These two categorizations describe different aspects of a v ...


Other aspects of Germanic verbs

*
Indo-European ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German ''Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
*
Germanic Umlaut The Germanic umlaut (sometimes called i-umlaut or i-mutation) is a type of linguistic umlaut in which a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel ( fronting) or a front vowel becomes closer to (raising) when the following syllable conta ...
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Verner's law Verner's law describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives , , , , , following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives , , , , . The law was ...
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Grammatischer Wechsel In historical linguistics, the German term ' ("grammatical alternation") refers to the effects of Verner's law Verner's law describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the vo ...


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