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In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel.A minority of verbs in any Germanic language are strong; the majority are weak verbs, which form the past tense by means of a dental suffix.
Strong (or vocalic) verbs display vowel gradation or ablaut, 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: fallan – feoll – feollon – (ge)fallen (to fall) hātan – hēt – hēton – (ge)hāten (to be called)
This applied both to stem-initial and stem-final labiovelars, and could be seen in verbs such as *strīkwaną "to stroke", where the -u- of the ending in the past nonsingular indicative (but not subjunctive) triggered delabialisation. In *kwemaną "to come", the -u- of the past participle stem itself triggered the change. [30]
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.
The past participle in Middle High German is formed by prefixing "ge-" to the verb stem, in addition to a dental suffix ("-d-" or "-(e)t-") for weak verbs, or by prefixing "ge-" to the infinitive of a strong verb, with a possible vowel change in the stem. The past participle of "sëhen" is "gesëhen"; the past participle of "dienen" is "gedienet".
Often intervening sound changes render the once transparent stem endings opaque, and the name may no longer make much sense synchronically. And even diachronically ; the i -, ja -, and jō -stems lose their overt i ’s in all inherited forms except the masculine and neuter nominative-accusative case during the ninth century.
In Old High German, the stops were moved according to the High German consonant shift. In Dutch, the idiosyncrasies of the shift mean that Dutch (like German) experiences the shift þ→d but (like English) does not experience the shift d→t; thus, the dental variety of grammatischer Wechsel is eliminated in Dutch by the normal operation of ...
In Germanic Languages, such as Swedish, Dutch and German, ablaut leveling occurs in relation to strong verbs. In the case of Swedish, the preterite will have a distinct vowel pattern in comparison to the past participle, specifically the preterite. An example of this would be the verb meaning to write, which is conjugated below: