Talk:Germanic weak verb

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[edit] Hebrew letters

Is it useful to use Hebrew letters for Yiddish words, when >95% won't be able to read it? Anyway ...shouldn't Hebrew script be written from right to left? I only recognise "aleph", but it seems to appear at the "wrong" side of the words. Rolf /Darmstadt --84.167.130.108 12:43, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The Yiddish words are spelled correctly. But you're right that transliterations should be included. AJD 13:44, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There may not be many of us who want the Hebrew characters, but pander to our whim and let there be both! --Doric Loon 17:09, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm not against Hebrew script, it's perfekt like this. But the German example seems somehow wrong: "wirken" normally means "to act"/"to be effective" (i.e. "Wirkung"), but "werken" means "to work (manually with material)" ("arbeiten" is more general "to work") (compare "Werkbank", "Werkkunde", "Goethes gesammelten Werke") Rolf, --84.167.169.36 23:56, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

OK forget about it, I can't really tell the past participle of "werken", "ich habe gewerkt" ??? It's to unusual, germans would automatically switch to "ich habe gearbeitet".

[edit] Afrikaans

I have added the Afrikaans forms of the verbs to the table though the strong verb has been lost from Afrikaans, all verbs follow the weak pattern. However the past participle of Afrikaans verbs have lost the /t/ or /d/ sound. For example the past participle of werk is gewerk rather than the ancestral Dutch gewerkt.

Therefore should the initial sentence still read the following? In Germanic languages, weak verbs are those verbs that form their preterites and past participles by means of a dental suffix, an inflection that contains a /t/ or /d/ sound. Booshank 12:16, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for this. I think in principle that sentence remains a fair opening, but in the case of Afrikaans the dental has been lost. One might of course ask, since both the dental and the ablaut system have disappeared entirely, whether weak and strong are meaningful concepts in Afrikaans at all. But that would be a discussion for the Afrikaans page, I suppose. --Doric Loon 12:40, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

I have never come across the terms 'strong' and 'weak' applied to Afrikaans verbs, I don't think one would use them if one was just looking at the Afrikaans language as the distinction between the two has been lost, but it seems useful when comparing Afrikaans with other Germanic languages. Booshank 12:47, 6 April 2006 (UTC)