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The so-called preterite-present verbs are a small group of anomalous verbs in the Germanic languages in which the present tense shows the form of the strong preterite. The preterite of the preterite-present verbs is weak. [1] As an example, take the third-person forms of modern German können "to be able to".
The preterite or preterit (/ ˈ p r ɛ t ər ɪ t / PRET-ər-it; abbreviated PRET or PRT) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense.
It is the most important tense in German. The Present tense is mainly used for simple present, present progressive, as well as for future. It is also used for historical past. Example: Ich kaufe das Auto. ("I buy the car") Preterite (Präteritum, in older works Imperfekt) – It is the past-conjugated form of the infinitive.
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.
Preterite-present verbs are primary verbs in which the PIE present was lost, and the perfect was given a present meaning. They needed a new past tense, which followed the weak pattern. Most borrowings from other languages into Germanic were weak. However, this was not always the case: for example, *skrībaną 'to write' from Latin scrībō.
Middle High German had two numbers, singular and plural, and three persons. The language had two simple tenses: present and preterite (or "simple past"). In addition, there were also three tenses that made use of auxiliary verbs: perfect, pluperfect, and future, all much less frequently used than in the modern language.
In German and Dutch it also remains in the present tense of the preterite presents. In Limburgish there is a little more left. E.g. the preterite of to help is (weer) hólpe for the plural but either (ich) halp or (ich) hólp for the singular.
The leveling comes in with the fact that the other tenses match one or the other of the tenses. In this case, the infinitive/present and preterite plural tenses follow the past participle and use the vowel "i". German and Dutch follow a different pattern, in that the vowels of the preterite singular and past participle are kept the same.
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