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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.
(Of these, creep, flee, leap, sleep and weep derive from verbs that were originally strong.) Verbs with vowel shortening and devoicing of the ending: deal, dream, feel, kneel, lean, leave, lose (originally strong) and mean. Some of the verbs in this and in the preceding group have alternative regular forms, such as dreamed and leaped.
Strong verbs use the Germanic form of conjugation known as ablaut. In this form of conjugation, the stem of the word changes to indicate the tense. Verbs like this persist in modern English; for example sing, sang, sung is a strong verb, as is swim, swam, swum and choose, chose, chosen. The root portion of the word changes rather than its ending.
This tendency for strong verbs to become weak dates as far back as Old English: sleep (slǣpan) and read (rǣdan) both shifted from strong to weak in the Old English period. Learning strong verbs is often a challenge for students of Old English, though modern English speakers may see connections between the old verb classes and their modern forms.
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 right-hand column notes whether the verb is weak or strong and whether it belongs to a subclass, and links to descriptions elsewhere. Information about the development of these verbs generally can be found at English irregular verbs; details of the etymology and usage of specific verbs can be found by consulting Wiktionary.
In a perfect world, most of us should take 10 to 20 minutes to fall asleep, with the average sleep latency (the time it takes to fall asleep) sitting at about 12 minutes. But alas, this world is ...
Germanic language strong verbs are verbs that change the vowel in the stem to form the past and past participle, rather than add a suffix. For an English example, contrast fall-fell-fallen (strong) from fell-felled (weak). The following is a table of all the different types and subtypes of strong verbs.