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.

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