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Strong verb may refer to: Germanic strong verb, a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel; Strong inflection, a system of verb conjugation contrasted with an alternative "weak" system in the same language; Irregular verb, any verb whose conjugation does not follow the typical pattern of the language to which it belongs
A strong inflection is a system of verb conjugation or noun/adjective declension 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 , but has since been used of other phenomena in these and other languages, which may or ...
The development of weak verbs in Germanic meant that the strong verb system ceased to be productive: practically all new verbs were weak, and few new strong verbs were created. Over time, strong verbs tended to become weak in some languages, so that the total number of strong verbs in Germanic languages has decreased over time.
An example verb *nemaną "to take" is shown here to illustrate the inflection of strong verbs. Other strong verbs were inflected analogously, but with different vowels in the root and/or reduplication of the initial consonant(s). The j-present verbs were inflected like weak class 1 verbs in the present tense, but dropped the j-suffix in the ...
German verbs may be classified as either weak, with a dental consonant inflection, or strong, showing a vowel gradation ().Both of these are regular systems. Most verbs of both types are regular, though various subgroups and anomalies do arise; however, textbooks for learners often class all strong verbs as irregular.
These verbs still exist in modern English; sing, sang, sung is a strong verb, as are swim, swam, swum and break, broke, broken. In modern English, strong verbs are rare, and they are mostly categorised as irregular verbs. In Old English, meanwhile, strong verbs were much more common and were not considered irregular.
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Verbs so formed are divided into separable verbs which detach the prefix under certain circumstances and inseparable verbs which do not. The conjugations are identical to that of the root verb, and the position of the prefix for both separable and inseparable verbs follows a standard pattern.