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German verbs are conjugated depending on their use: as in English, they 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 ...
There are six tenses in German: the present and past are conjugated, and there are four compound tenses. There are two categories of verbs in German: weak and strong. Some grammars use the term mixed verbs to refer to weak verbs with irregularities. For a historical perspective on German verbs, see Germanic weak verb and Germanic strong verb.
The past participle in Middle High German is formed by prefixing "ge-" to the verb stem, in addition to a dental suffix ("-d-" or "-(e)t-") for weak verbs, or by prefixing "ge-" to the infinitive of a strong verb, with a possible vowel change in the stem. The past participle of "sëhen" is "gesëhen"; the past participle of "dienen" is "gedienet".
Three compound tenses – the compound past, future, and conditional – are semantically identical with the corresponding simple tenses. The compound past tense consists of ha (the present tense of haber 'to have') plus the past participle. Le imperio ha cadite. = Le imperio cadeva. 'The empire fell.' The compound future tense is constructed ...
This has happened in the case of the English word went, which was originally the past tense of wend, but has come to be used instead as the past tense of go. The verb be also has a number of suppletive forms (be, is, was, etc., with various different origins) – this is common for copular verbs in Indo-European languages.
In some verbs, the past tense, past participle, or both are identical in form to the basic (infinitive) form of the verb. This is the case with certain strong verbs, where historical sound changes have led to a leveling of the vowel modifications: for example, let has both past tense and past participle identical to the infinitive, while come ...
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 ...
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").