Re: (In)transitive verbs

Quoting Costentin Cornomorus <elemtilas@...>:

> --- Tristan McLeay <zsau@...> wrote:
>
> > No. They're all irregular. If a verb doesn't
> > form its past/past participle
> > in -ed, it's irregular. It doesn't matter what
> > the justification of it is.
>
> It's not a matter of "justification". It's a
> matter of terminology set. Strong and weak tends
> to be used of Germanic languages, while regular
> and irregular tends to be used of Latin and
> Romance.
Well, both distinctions are used when describing Germanic languages. See may
other post re: German's irregular weak verbs.

"Strong" and "weak", in context, refers to to different ways of indicating the
preterite and imperfect tenses of the Germanic verb. Basically via ablaut vs
via suffixes.

"Regular" and "irregular" merely indicates conformance and non-conformance,
respectively, to some set of rules. The differences between English and German
terminology basically amounts to the later including the ablaut rules in the
set of considered ones, while the former does not.

Note that there are irregular English verbs which are not "strong".

                                                         Andreas

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