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. A minority of verbs in any Germanic language are strong; the majority are weak verbs, which form the past tense by means of a dental suffix.

In modern English, strong verbs include sing (present I sing, past I sang, past participle I have sung) and drive (present I drive, past I drove, past participle I have driven), as opposed to weak verbs such as open (present I open, past I opened, past participle I have opened). Not all verbs with a change in the stem vowel are strong verbs, however: they may also be irregular weak verbs such as keep, kept, kept or bring, brought, brought. The key distinction is that the system of strong verbs has its origin in the earliest sound system of Proto-Indo-European, whereas weak verbs use a dental ending (in English usually -ed or -t) that developed later with the branching off of Proto-Germanic.

The "strong" vs. "weak" terminology was coined by the German philologist Jacob Grimm in the 1800s, and the terms "strong verb" and "weak verb" are direct translations of the original German terms and .

Origin and development

Strong verbs have their origin in the ancestral Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language. In PIE, vowel alternations called ablaut were frequent and occurred in many types of word, not only in verbs. The basic vowel was *e (e-grade), but, depending on what syllable of a word the stress fell on in PIE, this could change to *o (o-grade), or disappear altogether (zero grade). Both e and o could also be lengthened to ē and ō (lengthened grade). Thus ablaut turned short e into the following sounds:

{| class="wikitable"

! zero

! short

! long

| rowspan=2 | Ø

| e

| ē

| o

| ō

As the Germanic languages developed from PIE, they dramatically altered the Indo-European verbal system. PIE verbs could occur in three distinct aspects: the aorist, present and perfect aspect. The aorist originally denoted events without any attention to the specifics or ongoing nature of the event ("ate", perfective aspect). The present implied some attention to such details and was thus used for ongoing actions ("is eating", imperfective aspect). The perfect was a stative verb, and referred not to the event itself, but to the state that resulted from the event ("has eaten" or "is / has been eaten"). In Germanic, the aorist eventually disappeared and merged with the present, while the perfect took on a past tense meaning and became a general past tense. The strong Germanic present thus descends from the PIE present, while the past descends from the PIE perfect.

In the course of these changes, the different root-vowels caused by PIE ablaut became markers of tense. Thus in Germanic, *bʰer- became in the infinitive (e-grade); *bar in the past singular (o-grade); *bērun in the past plural (ē-grade); and *buranaz in the past participle (zero-grade).

In Proto-Germanic, the system of strong verbs was largely regular. As sound changes took place in the development of Germanic from PIE, the vowels of strong verbs became more varied, but usually in predictable ways, so in most cases all of the principal parts of a strong verb of a given class could be reliably predicted from the infinitive. Thus we can reconstruct Common Germanic as having seven coherent classes of strong verbs. This system continued largely intact in the first attested Germanic languages, notably Gothic, Old English, Old High German and Old Norse.

Gradual disappearance

As well as developing the strong verb system, Germanic also went on to develop two other classes of verbs: the weak verbs and a third, much smaller, class known as the preterite-present verbs, which are continued in the English auxiliary verbs, e.g. can/could, shall/should, may/might, must. Weak verbs originally derived from other types of word in PIE and originally occurred only in the present aspect. They did not have a perfect aspect, meaning that they came to lack a past tense form in Germanic once the perfect had become the past. Not having a past tense at all, they obviously also had no vowel alternations between present and past. To compensate for this, a new type of past tense was eventually created for these verbs by adding a -d- or -t- suffix to the stem. This is why only strong verbs have vowel alternations: their past tense forms descend from the original PIE perfect aspect, while the past tense forms of weak verbs were created later.

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 across languages, so that the total number of strong verbs in Germanic languages has decreased over time.

The coherence of the strong verb system is still present in modern German, Dutch, Icelandic and Faroese. For example, in German and Dutch, strong verbs are consistently marked with a past participle in -en, while weak verbs have a past participle in -t in German and -t or -d in Dutch. In English, however, the original regular strong conjugations have largely disintegrated, with the result that in modern English grammar, a distinction between strong and weak verbs is less useful than a distinction between "regular" and "irregular" verbs. Thus, the verb to help, which used to be conjugated help-holp-holpen, is now help-helped-helped. The reverse phenomenon, whereby a weak verb becomes strong by analogy, is rare.

Some verbs, which might be termed "semi-strong", have formed a weak preterite but retained the strong participle, or rarely vice versa. This type of verb is most common in Dutch:

lachen lachte (formerly loech) gelachen ("to laugh")
vragen vroeg (formerly vraagde) gevraagd ("to ask")

An instance of this phenomenon in English is swell, swelled, swollen (though swelled is also found for the past participle, and the older strong form swole persists in some dialects as the preterite and past participle and has found new use in recent years.).

Conjugation

As an example of the conjugation of a strong verb, we may take the Old English class 2 verb , "to offer" (cf. English "bid").

This has the following forms:

{| class="wikitable"

! Infinitive

! Supine

! Present Indicative

! Present Subjunctive

! Past Indicative

! Past Subjunctive

! Imperative

! Past participle

þū

hē

wē

gē

hīe

þū

hē

wē

gē

hīe

þū

hē

wē

gē

hīe

þū

hē

wē

gē

hīe

–

–

–

While the inflections are more or less regular, the vowel changes in the stem are not predictable without an understanding of the Indo-European ablaut system, and students have to learn five "principal parts" by heart. For this verb they are . These are:

The infinitive: '. The same vowel is used through most of the present tense. In most verbs (other than classes 6 and 7), this represents the original ablaut e-grade.
The present tense 3rd singular: '. The same vowel is used in the 2nd singular. In many verbs, this has the same vowel as part 1. When it is distinct, as here, it is always derived from part 1 by Umlaut. For this reason, some textbooks do not treat it as a principal part.
The preterite (i.e. past indicative) 1st singular: ', which is identical to the 3rd singular. In this verb, part 3 comes from a PIE o-grade.
The preterite plural: '. In West Germanic, the same vowel is used in the 2nd singular. In this verb, part 4 comes from a PIE zero-grade.
The past participle: '. This vowel is used only in the participle. In some verbs, part 5 is a discrete ablaut grade, but in this class 2 verb it is derived from part 4 by an a-mutation.

Strong verb classes

Germanic strong verbs are commonly divided into seven classes, based on the type of vowel alternation. This is in turn based mostly on the type of consonants that follow the vowel. The Anglo-Saxon scholar Henry Sweet gave names to the seven classes:

The "drive" conjugation
The "choose" conjugation
The "bind" conjugation
The "bear" conjugation
The "give" conjugation
The "shake" conjugation
The "fall" conjugation

However, they are normally referred to by numbers alone.

In Proto-Germanic, the common ancestor of the Germanic languages, the strong verbs were still mostly regular. The classes continued largely intact in Old English and the other older historical Germanic languages: Gothic, Old High German and Old Norse. However, idiosyncrasies of the phonological changes led to a growing number of subgroups. Also, once the ablaut system ceased to be productive, there was a decline in the speakers' awareness of the regularity of the system. That led to anomalous forms and the six big classes lost their cohesion. This process has advanced furthest in English, but in some other modern Germanic languages (such as German), the seven classes are still fairly well preserved and recognisable.

The reverse process in which anomalies are eliminated and subgroups reunited by the force of analogy is called "levelling", and it can be seen at various points in the history of the verb classes.

In the later Middle Ages, German, Dutch and English eliminated a great part of the old distinction between the vowels of the singular and plural preterite forms. The new uniform preterite could be based on the vowel of the old preterite singular, on the old plural, or sometimes on the participle. In English, the distinction remains in the verb "to be": I was, we were. In Dutch, it remains in the verbs of classes 4 & 5 but only in vowel length: ik brak (I broke – short a), wij braken (we broke – long ā). 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.

In the process of development of English, numerous sound changes and analogical developments have fragmented the classes to the extent that most of them no longer have any coherence: only classes 1, 3 and 4 still have significant subclasses that follow uniform patterns.

Before looking at the seven classes individually, the general developments that affected all of them will be noted. The following phonological changes that occurred between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic are relevant for the discussion of the ablaut system.

The development of grammatischer Wechsel as a result of Verner's law (the voicing of fricatives after an unstressed vowel). This created variations in the consonant following the ablaut vowel.
When the zero grade appears before l, r, m or n, the vowel u was inserted, effectively creating a new "u-grade".
o → a (also oy → ai, ow → au).
e → i when i, ī or j followed in the next syllable. This change is known as umlaut, and was extended to affect other vowels in most later languages.
ey → ī as a result of the above.
e → i before m or n followed by another consonant. This had the effect of splitting class 3 into 3a and 3b.

In West Germanic, the 2nd person singular past indicative uses the vowel of Part 3. Its ending is also an -i of unclear origin, rather than the expected -t < PIE *-th₂e of North and East Germanic, which suggests that this state of affairs is an innovation.

Classes 1 to 6

The first 5 classes appear to continue the following PIE ablaut grades:

{| class="wikitable"

! Class

! Part 1

! Part 2

! Part 3

! Part 4

| 1, 2, 3

| rowspan="3" | e

| rowspan="3" | o

| colspan="2" | zero

| 4

| rowspan="2" | ē

| zero

| 5

| e

Except for the apparent ē-grade in part 3 of classes 4 and 5, these are in fact straightforward survivals of the PIE situation.

The standard pattern of PIE is represented in Germanic by classes 1, 2, and 3, with the present (part 1) in the e-grade, past indicative singular (part 2) in the o-grade, and remaining past (part 3) and past participle (part 4) in the zero grade. The differences between classes 1, 2, and 3 arise from semivowels coming after the root vowel, as shown in the table below.

As can be seen, the e-grade in part 1 and o-grade in part 2 are shared by all of these five classes. The difference between them is in parts 3 and 4:

In classes 1 and 2, the semivowel following the vowel was converted in the zero grade into a full vowel.
In class 3 and the past participle of class 4, there was no semivowel but there were PIE syllabic resonants which developed in Germanic to u plus resonant; thus u became the Germanic sign of these parts. There is some evidence that this may have been the original behaviour of the past nonsingular / nonindicative of class 4 as well: to wit, preterite-presents whose roots have the class 4 shape show u outside the present indicative singular, such as *man- ~ *mun- "to remember", *skal- ~ *skul- "to owe".
In class 5, the zero grade of the past participle had probably been changed to e-grade already in PIE, because these verbs had combinations of consonants that were phonotactically illicit as a word-initial cluster, as they would be in the zero grade.
The *ē in part 3 of classes 4 and 5 is not in fact a PIE lengthened grade but arose in Germanic. Ringe suggests that it was analogically generalised from the inherited part 3 of the verb *etaną "to eat" before it had lost its reduplicant syllable, PIE *h₁eh₁d- regularly becoming Germanic *ēt-.

Class 6 appears in Germanic with the vowels a and ō. PIE sources of the a vowel included *h₂e, *o, and a laryngeal between consonants;

possibly in some cases the a may be an example of the a-grade of ablaut, though the existence of such a grade is controversial. It is not clear exactly how the ō is to be derived from an earlier ablaut alternant in PIE, but believable sources include contraction of the reduplicant syllable in PIE *h₂-initial verbs, or o-grades of verbs with interconsonantal laryngeal. In any event, within Germanic the resulting a ~ ō behaved as just another type of vowel alternation.

In Proto-Germanic, this resulted in the following vowel patterns:

{| class="wikitable"

! Class

! Part 1

! Part 2

! Part 3

! Part 4

! Verb meaning

! Usual PIE origin

| 1

| *rīdaną

| *raid

| *ridun

| *ridanaz

| to ride

| Vowel + y/i.

| 2a

| *freusaną

| *fraus

| *fruzun

| *fruzanaz

| to freeze

| Vowel + w/u.

| 2b

| *lūkaną

| *lauk

| *lukun

| *lukanaz

| to close, to shut

| Arose in analogy to Class 1.

| 3a

| *bindaną

| *band

| *bundun

| *bundanaz

| to bind

| Vowel + m or n + another consonant.

| 3b

| *werþaną

| *warþ

| *wurdun

| *wurdanaz

| to become

| Vowel + l or r + another consonant.

| 4

| *beraną

| *bar

| *bērun

| *buranaz

| to bear

| Vowel + l, r, m or n + no other consonant.

| 5

| *lesaną

| *las

| *lēzun

| *lezanaz

| to gather

| Vowel + any consonant other than y, w, l, r, m or n.

| 6

| *alaną

| *ōl

| *ōlun

| *alanaz

| to grow, to mature

| Vowel + a single consonant, if the present stem had a or o in late PIE.

Class 2b is of unknown origin, and does not seem to reflect any PIE ablaut pattern.
In class 3, there are also a few cases where the vowel is followed, at least in Proto-Germanic, by two consonants, neither of which is a nasal or a liquid. Examples: *brestaną "to burst", *þreskaną "to thresh" *fehtaną "to fight". All but one have a nasal or a liquid in front of the vowel. This will have become syllabic and resulted regularly in u before the nasal or liquid, which was then metathesised on the analogy of the remaining principal parts. E.g. part 3 of *brestaną will have been *bʰr̥st- > *burst-, reformed to *brust-.
Similarly, class 6 includes some cases where the vowel is followed by two obstruents, like *wahsijaną "to grow".
In classes 5, 6 and 7, there is also a small subgroup called "j-presents". These form their present tense with an extra -j-, which causes umlaut in the present where possible. In West Germanic, it also causes the West Germanic gemination.

Class 7

The forms of class 7 were very different and did not neatly reflect the standard ablaut grades found in classes 1–6. Instead of (or in addition to) vowel alternations, this class displayed reduplication of the first consonants of the stem in the past tense.

It is generally believed that reduplication was once a feature of all Proto-Indo-European perfect-aspect forms. It was then lost in most verbs by Proto-Germanic times due to haplology. However, verbs with vowels that did not fit in the existing pattern of alternation retained their reduplication. Class 7 is thus not really one class, but can be split into several subclasses based on the original structure of the root, much like the first five classes. The first three subclasses are parallel with classes 1–3 but with e replaced with a: Class 7a is parallel to class 1, class 7b to class 2, and class 7c to class 3.

The following is a general picture of the Proto-Germanic situation as reconstructed by Jasanoff. Earlier reconstructions of class 7 were generally based mostly on Gothic evidence.

{| class="wikitable"

! Subclass

! Part 1

! Part 2

! Part 3

! Part 4

! Verb meaning

! Root pattern

| 7a

| *haitaną

| *hegait

| *hegitun

| *haitanaz

| to call

| a + i

| 7b

| *hlaupaną *stautaną

| *heglaup *stestaut

| *heglupun *stestutun

| *hlaupanaz *stautanaz

| to leap to push, to bump

| a + u

| 7c

| *haldaną *fanhaną

| *hegald *febanh

| *heguldun *febungun

| *haldanaz *fanganaz

| to hold to catch

| a + l, r, m or n + another consonant (if no other consonant follows, the verb belongs to class 6)

| 7d

| *lētaną *sēaną

| *lelōt *sezō

| *lel-tun *sez-un

| *lētanaz *sēanaz

| to allow, to let to sow

| ē

| 7e

| *blōtaną *grōaną

| *beblōt *gegrō

| *beblō?tun