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In the Germanic languages, weak verbs are by far the largest group of verbs, and 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 an inflection containing a /t/, /d/, or /ð/ sound (as in English I walk~I walked) rather than by changing the verb's root vowel (as in English I ...
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 so-called preterite-present verbs are a small group of anomalous verbs in the Germanic languages in which the present tense shows the form of the strong preterite. The preterite of the preterite-present verbs is weak. [1] As an example, take the third-person forms of modern German können "to be able to".
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.
Verbs in Middle High German are divided into two basic categories, based upon the formation of the preterite: strong and weak. Strong verbs exhibit an alternation of the stem vowel in the preterite and past participle (called apophony, vowel gradation, or, traditionally, Ablaut), while in weak verbs, the vowel generally remains the same as in ...
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 past tense and then inflected like regular strong verbs.
There are also strong and weak declensions of German adjectives. This differs from the situation in nouns and verbs in that every adjective can be declined using either the strong or the weak declension. As with the nouns, weak in this case means the declension in -n. In this context, the terms "strong" and "weak" seem particularly appropriate ...
German has many more weak nouns than English; for example, Bär (pl. Bären) "bear", Name (pl. Namen) "name", Held (pl. Helden) "hero". Some nouns such as the neuter noun Auge (pl. Augen) have a mixed inflection, being strong in the singular but having the characteristic -en plural ending of a weak noun.