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The Germanic language family is one of the language groups which resulted from the breakup of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It in turn divided into North, West and East Germanic groups, and ultimately produced a large group of mediaeval and modern languages, most importantly: Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (North); English, German and Dutch (West); and Gothic (East, extinct).
The Germanic verb system lends itself to both descriptive (synchronic) and historical (diachronic) comparative analysis. This overview article is intended to lead into a series of specialist articles discussing historical aspects of these verbs, showing how they developed out of PIE, and how they came to have their present diversity.
Wikipedia articles relating to Germanic verbs
Specialist subsidiary and related articles are: Germanic weak verb, Preterite-present verb, Germanic strong verb, Indo-European copula; Go (verb).
For the verb in particular Germanic languages, see: English grammar, English verbs, English irregular verbs, List of English irregular verbs, German verbs, de:Liste starker Verben (Deutsche Sprache) de:Liste starker Verben (Bairische Sprache), Dutch grammar.
For other aspects of Germanic verbs, see the articles Indo-European ablaut, Germanic Umlaut, Wandel, Verner's law and grammatischer Wechsel.
General articles are: Verb, Regular verb, Irregular verb, Copula, Principal parts, Infinitive, Past tense, Present tense, Future tense, Suppletion.
Types of verbs in Germanic
The Germanic verb system carried two innovations over the previous Indo-European verb system:
- Simplification to two tenses: present (also conveying future meaning) and preterite (expressing or describing a past action or condition).
- Development of a new way of indicating the preterite and past participle, using a dental suffix.
Germanic verbs fall into two broad types, strong and weak. Elements of both are present in the preterite-present verbs. Despite various irregularities, most verbs fall into one of these categories. Only two verbs are completely irregular, being composed of parts of more than one Indo-European verb.
Strong verbs
See main article: Germanic strong verb.
Strong (or vocalic) verbs display vowel gradation or ablaut, and may also be reduplicating. These are the direct descendants of the verb in Proto-Indo-European, and are paralleled in other Indo-European languages such as Greek: leipo leloipa elipon. All Indo-European verbs which passed into Germanic as functioning verbs were strong, apart from the small group of irregular verbs discussed below.
Examples in Old English:
- fallan — feoll — feollon — (ge)fallen
- hātan — hēt — hēton — (ge)hāten
Or Old High German:
- fallan — fiall — fiallun — (gi)fallan
- heizan — hiaz — hiazun — (gi)heizan
In Proto-Germanic consonant alternations known as grammatischer Wechsel developed, as a result of Verner's law. An example in modern Dutch:
- verliezen — verloor — verloren
Weak verbs
Main article: Germanic weak verb
Weak (or consonantal) verbs are those which use a dental suffix, either -t- or -d-. In Germanic, the strong verb system ceased to be productive and the consonantal preterite became the only productive conjugation in all the Germanic languages. All new verbs in any modern Germanic language are consonantal. Most of the original strong verbs have since become weak. This is therefore the standard "regular" verb group in the modern languages.
Preterite-presents
Main article: Preterite-present verb
These verbs have a present tense looking like a vocalic preterite, originally from an Proto-Indo-European perfect, and preterite with dental suffix.
Suppletive verbs
Main articles: Indo-European copula; Go (verb).
A small number of Germanic verbs show the phenomenon of suppletion, that is, they are made up from more than one stem. The verb to be has its forms from four IE roots (*es-, *er-, *bhu- and *wes-).
The phenomenon of verb paradigms being composites of parts of different earlier verbs can best be observed in an example from recorded language history. The English verb to go was always irregular, having the past tense eode in Old English; in the 15th century, however, this was replaced by a new irregular past tense went. In fact went is originally the past tense of the verb to wend (compare wend-went with send-sent); today wend has the regular past tense wended.
IE optative
A special case is *wiljana (to want, will), which has its present forms from an IE optative. Today, only Faroese retains the optative, yet today it is mostly used in fixed syllables.
Regular and irregular verbs
When teaching modern languages, it is usually most useful to have a narrow definition of a "regular verb" and treat all other groups as irregular. See the article irregular verb. By this standard, English has 283 irregular verbs, and only the most straightforward weak verb counts as regular. (In English, the strong verb system has collapsed so far that all strong verbs can be regarded as irregular.)
In historical linguistics however we seek patterns to explain anomalies and tend only to speak of "irregular verbs" when these patterns cannot be found. Most of the 283 English "irregular" verbs belong to historical categories which are regular within their own terms. However, the suppletive verbs are irregular by any standards, and for most purposes the preterite-presents can also count as irregular. Beyond this, isolated irregularities occur in all Germanic languages in both the strong and the weak verb system.
"Germanic verb"