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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.
In that understanding, English has abundant examples of weak suppletion in its verbal inflection: e.g. bring/brought, take/took, see/saw, etc. Even though the forms are etymologically related in each pair, no productive morphological rule can derive one form from the other in synchrony.
A word may have different pronunciations, depending on its phonetic environment (the neighbouring sounds) or on the degree of stress in a sentence. An example of the latter is the weak and strong forms of certain English function words like some and but (pronounced /sʌm/, /bʌt/ when stressed but /s(ə)m/, /bət/ when unstressed).
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 ...
NEG liyan heart nga-la-ma 1 - IRR -put Arra liyan nga-la-ma NEG heart 1-IRR-put "I don’t want to." In a case such as the above, liyan ' heart ' is the preverb containing most of the semantic content. Likewise with goo ' hit ' in the following example: garr rub nga-na-m-boo-gal 1 - TR - PST -hit- REC garr nga-na-m-boo-gal rub 1-TR-PST-hit-REC 'I rubbed him (to stop his pain)' Jingulu ...
Some weak verbs with long vowels in their present tense stems (such as keep) took a short vowel in the past tense and past participle (kept). [4] In some weak verbs ending in a final -t or -d, this final consonant coalesced with the weak past ending to leave a single -t or -d in the past forms.
Verbs in Old Saxon are divided into strong and weak verbs. Strong verbs indicate tense by a change in the quality of a vowel, while weak verbs indicate tense by the addition of an ending. Here is a quick sum up of all the Old Saxon classes of strong and weak verbs. More information on these classes are given below.