Germanic weak verb

Origins

The weak conjugation of verbs is an innovation of Proto-Germanic (unlike Germanic strong verbs, which go back to Proto-Indo-European). The origin of the dental suffix is uncertain. One theory is that it evolved out of a periphrastic construct with the verb to do: Germanic *lubōjana dēdo ("love-did") → *lubōdo → Old English lufode → loved. This would be analogous to the way that in Modern English we can form an emphatic past tense with "did": I did love. Another theory is that it came from a past participle ending, a final *-daz from PIE *-tos (cf Latin amatus), with personal endings added to it at a later stage. Both theories are disputed because of their inability to explain all the facts.

Weak and Strong

Weak verbs should be contrasted with strong verbs, which form their past tenses by means of ablaut. All the original Indo-European verbs which came into Germanic as verbs were once strong. However, as the ablaut system is no longer productive except in rare cases of analogy, almost all new verbs in Germanic languages are weak, and the majority of the original strong verbs have become weak by analogy. In some cases a verb has become weak in the preterite but not in the participle, or (rarely) vice versa. These verbs may be thought of as "semi-strong" (not a technical term). Dutch has a number of examples of this:

• wassen waste gewassen ("to wash")
• jagen joeg gejaagd ("to hunt")

Historical conjugations

In the medieval Germanic languages, a number of different classes of weak verbs had to be distinguished, according to the consonants in the stem. Class 1 is known as the -jan conjugation, because their development was influenced by a /j/ in Germanic, which however is only attested in Old Saxon. In Old English, class 1 weak verbs commonly had preterites ending in -ede. This group commonly experienced consonant doubling in the infinitive caused by West Germanic Gemination. Class 2 weak verbs typically ended in -ode in Old English. Besides these two main classes there were several smaller ones.

Modern paradigms

In the modern languages, these distinctions have mostly been levelled. The regular weak verbs conjugate as follows:

	English	Afrikaans	Dutch	German	Swedish	Icelandic	Yiddish
Infinitive	to work	werk	werken	wirken	verka	verka	(verkn) װערקן
present	I work you work he works we work you work they work	ek werk jy werk hy werk ons werk julle werk hulle werk	ik werk jij werkt hij werkt wij werken jullie werken zij werken	ich wirke du wirkst er wirkt wir wirken ihr wirkt sie wirken	jag verkar du verkar han verkar vi verkar ni verkar de verkar	ég verka þú verkar hann verkar við verkum þið verkið þeir verka	(ikh verk) איך װערק (du verkst) דו װערקסט (er verkt) ער װערקט (mir verkn) מיר װערקן (ir verkt) איר װערקט (zey verkn) זי װערקן
Preterite	I worked you worked he worked we worked you worked they worked	(not used)	ik werkte jij werkte hij werkte wij werkten jullie werkten zij werkten	ich wirkte du wirktest er wirkte wir wirkten ihr wirktet sie wirkten	jag verkade du verkade han verkade vi verkade ni verkade de verkade	ég verkaði þú verkaðir hann verkaði við verkuðum þið verkuðuð þeir verkuðu	(not used)
Past participle	worked	gewerk	gewerkt	gewirkt	verkat	verkaður	(geverkt) געװערקט

Irregularities

Weak verbs are often thought of as having a regular inflection, but not all weak verbs are regular verbs; some have been made irregular by ellipsis or contraction, such as hear ~ heard; while others are merely irregular due to the eccentricities of English spelling, such as lay ~ laid. In German, verbs ending in -eln or -ern have slightly different inflection patterns. There are many other examples. The Preterite-present verbs are in a sense weak verbs with very significant irregularities; but usually they are not bracketed under weak verbs.

One particularly interesting category of irregular weak verb is the so-called rückumlaut verb. This is discussed in the article on Germanic umlaut under the section "Umlaut in Germanic verbs". An original -j- in the inflection caused the whole of the present stem (including the infinitive) to experience a fronting of the stem vowel, though the past tense retains the back vowel. Another irregularity is a consonant alternation sometimes referred to by the German word Primärberührung, which looks superficially like Grammatischer Wechsel but in fact results from the phenomenon of the Germanic spirant law in early Germanic. In effect this is a process of assimilation of the plosive at the end of the stem caused by contact with the dental suffix. Both Rückumlaut and Primärberührung are observable in the verb to think:

• English: think thought
• German: denken dachte gedacht

Other meanings

The term "weak verb" was originally coined by Jakob Grimm and in his sense refers only to Germanic philology. However, the term is sometimes applied to other language groups to designate phenomena which are not really analogous. For example, Hebrew irregular verbs are sometimes called weak verbs because one of their radicals is weak.

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