{{About, , irregular verbs, regular verb, strong verbs in Germanic languages, Germanic strong verb
A strong inflection is a system of
verb conjugation or noun/adjective
declension
In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ...
which can be contrasted with an alternative system in the same language, which is then known as a
weak inflection. The term ''strong'' was coined with reference to the
Germanic verb, but has since been used of other phenomena in these and other languages, which may or may not be analogous. Note that there is nothing objectively "strong" about a strong form; the term is only meaningful in opposition to "weak" as a means of distinguishing paradigms within a single language. Nor is there any distinguishing feature common to all strong forms, except that they are always counterpoints to "weak" ones.
The
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 ( ablaut). The majority of the remaining verbs form the past tense by means of a dental suffix (e.g. ''-ed'' in English), and are k ...
, occurring in Germanic languages including German and English, is characterised by a vowel shift called
ablaut
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).
An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
. Examples in English include ''give/gave, come/came, fall/fell''. There is nothing comparable in the German strong adjective inflections. For a full discussion of this distinction see
weak inflection.
Verb types
Germanic languages
sv:Starka verb