{{Unreferenced, date=June 2019, bot=noref (GreenC bot)
A strong inflection is a system of
verb conjugation or noun/adjective
declension
In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence by way of an inflection. Declension may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and det ...
which can be contrasted with an alternative system in the same language, which is then known as a
weak inflection. The term ''strong'' was coined with reference to the
Germanic verb
The Germanic languages, Germanic language family is one of the language groups that resulted from the breakup of Proto-Indo-European language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It in turn divided into North Germanic languages, North, West Germanic langua ...
, but has since been used of other phenomena in these and other languages, which may or may not be analogous. Note that there is nothing objectively "strong" about a strong form; the term is only meaningful in opposition to "weak" as a means of distinguishing paradigms within a single language. Nor is there any distinguishing feature common to all strong forms, except that they are always counterpoints to "weak" ones.
The
Germanic strong verb
In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is a verb that marks its past tense by means of Indo-European ablaut, changes to the stem vowel. A minority of verbs in any Germanic language are strong; the majority are ''Germanic weak verb, weak verbs'' ...
, occurring in Germanic languages including German and English, is characterised by a vowel shift called
ablaut. Examples in English include ''give/gave, come/came, fall/fell''. There is nothing comparable in the German strong adjective inflections. For a full discussion of this distinction see
weak inflection.
Verb types
Germanic languages
sv:Starka verb