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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.
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.
Thus for example, most text books for learning English or German treat all strong verbs as irregular, and only the most straightforward weak verb counts as regular. In historical linguistics, however, regular patterns are examined diachronically, and verbs tend only to be described as "irregular" when such patterns cannot be found.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...