Re: Strong/weak verbs

As Charlie has so wonderfully pointed out bringen brachte gebracht as this
pattern, I would like to employ this as well. It seems however that I would
need to qualify when I would use this rather than a simple ablaut. As you
have pointed out these different classes, I suspect that I would have to
define such classes in my conlang as well. Tristan, can you please direct me
to where I can read more on how to identify these classes? I would
appreciate it.
Thank you
Scotto

-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On
Behalf Of T. A. McLeay
Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2007 1:13 AM
To: CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu
Subject: Re: Strong/weak verbs

Scotto Hlad wrote:
> I've been thinking long and detailed through my German studies from
> many years ago. Weak German verbs add -te for past tense and ge- + -te
> for the past participle. Strong verbs change by ablaut. I cannot think
> of any verbs which change by ablaut and used the weak verb
> prefix/postfix. Is there such a thing? Would such a pattern exist in any
other natlangs?

This generally does not happen in Germanic languages because strong and weak
verbs are separate classes (a variant of "do" was postfixed to verbs which
did not undergo vowel changes at the time), so strong verbs do not take weak
verb inflexions (although I just checked now after making an earlier post
mentioning something similar, and Modern English sleep:slept is a strong
verb (class 7) that takes a dental suffix --- on the other hand strong verbs
and especially class 7 ones in English aren't much more than a historical
grouping of irregular verbs). And of course in English there's plenty of
irregular weak verbs, like think:thought.

However, the concepts of strong and weak verbs and ablaut are perculiar to
Germanic and Indo-European languages. Other language families behave
differently and do have infixes/vowelchanges and suffixes concurrently:
look at the Semitic languages for more examples than you can shake a stick
at.

(I made a mistake in another post, where I mistook "keep"~"kept" (a weak
verb with vowel reduction, same as "dream"~"dreamt") for "sleep"~"slept"
(a class 7 strong verb with a dental suffix) --- I'm sure you can understand
my confusion!)

--
Tristan.