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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").
The case of German is similar: the Präteritum is the simple (non-compound) past tense, which does not always imply perfective aspect, and is anyway often replaced by the Perfekt (compound past) even in perfective past meanings. Preterite may be denoted by the glossing abbreviation PRET or PRT.
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 ...
This past tense is mainly used in written German and formal speech, except for some frequent verbs whose preterite forms are common colloquially (such as ich war, ich hatte, ich kam). It is also used for past progressive. Otherwise, the perfect is much preferred in colloquial language, but in northern regions of Germany it is more frequently used.
The past tense of stahn (stunn), which derives from Middle Low German standen, also belongs to this class. Finally the verb waschen shows preterite wusch and past participle wuschen, just like fallen, fangen and hangen, they seem to make a new strong verb class. In class 7, the various past tense forms have merged into a uniform -ee-.
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 ...
The NTSB says when the Jan. 29 collision between a passenger plane and helicopter occurred, the air traffic control tower had five persons on duty.
Preterite-present verbs were in principle weak verbs, since they formed their past tense with the weak dental suffix. However, they were unique in that their present tense forms were not those of the other verbs; rather, they were identical to the past tense forms of strong verbs. They descended from old Indo-European verbs that retained their ...