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For many German tenses, the verb itself is locked in a non-varying form of the infinitive or past participle (which normally starts with ge-) that is the same regardless of the subject, and then joined to an auxiliary verb that is conjugated. This is similar to English grammar, though the primary verb is normally placed at the end of the clause.
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").
There are six tenses in German: the present and past are conjugated, and there are four compound tenses. There are two categories of verbs in German: weak and strong. Some grammars use the term mixed verbs to refer to weak verbs with irregularities. For a historical perspective on German verbs, see Germanic weak verb and Germanic strong verb.
(The verb sew was always weak, even though one can say sewn for the past participle.) The verb show, originally a weak verb, has acquired a strong past participle shown, and in some dialects even a class 7 strong past tense shew (This "shew" is not to be confused with present "shew", which is an older spelling of, and pronounced the same as ...
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".
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 ...
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.
German sentence structure is the structure to which the German language adheres. German is an OV (Object-Verb) language. [1] Additionally, German, like all west Germanic languages except English, [note 1] uses V2 word order, though only in independent clauses. In dependent clauses, the finite verb is placed last.