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The Germanic verb system carried two innovations over the previous Proto-Indo-European verb 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").
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.
This list contains Germanic elements of the English language which have a close corresponding Latinate form. The correspondence is semantic—in most cases these words are not cognates, but in some cases they are doublets, i.e., ultimately derived from the same root, generally Proto-Indo-European, as in cow and beef, both ultimately from PIE *gʷōus.
Verbs are given in their "dictionary form". The exact form given depends on the specific language: For the Germanic languages and for Welsh, the infinitive is given. For Latin, the Baltic languages, and the Slavic languages, the first-person singular present indicative is given, with the infinitive supplied in parentheses.
Strong verbs used ablaut (i.e. a different vowel in the stem) and/or reduplication to mark the past tense. Almost all Proto-Germanic strong verbs were thematic verbs formed directly from a verbal root, although a few relic verbs exhibited other formations such as j-present (from PIE -ye/yo-) or n-infix verbs. [26]
The grammar of the German language is quite similar to that of the other Germanic languages.Although some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that of English in that it has, among other things, cases and gender in nouns and a strict verb-second word order in main clauses.
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.
Verbs in German are modified depending on the persons (identity) and number of the subject of a sentence, as well as depending on the tense and mood. The citation form of German verbs is the infinitive form, which generally consists of the bare form of the verb with -(e)n added to the end. To conjugate regular verbs, this is removed and ...