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These verbs still exist in modern English; sing, sang, sung is a strong verb, as are swim, swam, swum and break, broke, broken. In modern English, strong verbs are rare, and they are mostly categorised as irregular verbs. In Old English, meanwhile, strong verbs were much more common and were not considered irregular.
As in Modern English, and peculiar to the Germanic languages, the verbs formed two great classes: weak (regular), and strong (irregular). Like today, Old English had fewer strong verbs, and many of these have over time decayed into weak forms. Then, as now, dental suffixes indicated the past tense of the weak verbs, as in work and worked. [2]
Contents. Germanic strong verb. In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel. The majority of the remaining verbs form the past tense by means of a dental suffix, are known as weak verbs, and outnumber strong verbs. In modern English, strong verbs include sing (present I sing ...
In the older stages of the Germanic languages (Old English, Middle High German) the past tense of strong verbs also showed different ablaut grades in singular and plural. Many of the preterite-present verbs function as modal verbs (auxiliaries which are followed by a bare infinitive , without "to" in English, and which convey modality ) and ...
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. In Old English, there were seven major classes of a strong verb; each class has its own pattern of stem changes.
The verb shall derives from Old English sceal. Its cognates in other Germanic languages include Old Norse skal, German soll, and Dutch zal; these all represent *skol-, the o-grade of Indo-European *skel-. All of these verbs function as auxiliaries, representing either simple futurity, or necessity or obligation.
t. e. Verbs constitute one of the main parts of speech (word classes) in the English language. Like other types of words in the language, English verbs are not heavily inflected. Most combinations of tense, aspect, mood and voice are expressed periphrastically, using constructions with auxiliary verbs. Generally, the only inflected forms of an ...
Since this *z changed to *r in the North Germanics and in West Germanic (German, Dutch, English, Frisian), Verner's Law resulted in alternation of *s and *r in some inflectional paradigms, known as grammatischer Wechsel. [5] For example, the Old English verb ceosan 'choose' had the past plural form curon and the past participle (ge)coren.