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The Germanic strong preterite shows the expected Germanic development of short o to short a in the singular and zero grade in the plural; these make up the second and third principal parts of the strong verb. The Indo-European perfect originally carried its own set of personal endings, the remnants of which are seen in the Germanic strong ...
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, past I sang, past participle I ...
Since their present tense inflection is identical to the past (or preterite) tense inflection of strong verbs, they are known as preterite-present verbs. As in other Indo-European languages, a verb in Proto-Germanic could have a preverb attached to it, modifying its meaning (cf. e.g. *fra-werþaną "to perish", derived from *werþaną "to become").
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 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 ...
So-called "preterite-present verbs" are a feature of Germanic languages that have a present tense formed like the past tense (or "preterite") of strong verbs. The verbs often have the semantics of modal verbs , and in fact the present-day English modal verbs "can, could, may, might, shall, should, must" are descended from Old English preterite ...
A few verbs are regular in their spoken forms, but have irregular spelling. The irregular weak verbs (being in normal use) can consequently be grouped as follows: Verbs with vowel shortening: creep, flee, hear, keep, leap, shoe (when shod is used), sleep, sweep and weep. (Of these, creep, flee, leap, sleep and weep derive from verbs that were ...
German verbs may be classified as either weak, with a dental consonant inflection, or strong, showing a vowel gradation (ablaut). 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.