Talk:Germanic strong verb

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[edit] Work in progress

STUB!

Yes, but bear with me - it may take a couple of days, but I have the material on my harddisk!--Doric Loon 08:58, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

OK, this is now where I wanted to get it to. It would be good if other people could add a short note of the Afrikaans or Yiddish situation at the end of each section. And apart from that, I would be glad of a careful correction from anyone interested enough to get out the source books and check it all. What we need now is similar work done on the articles East Germanic strong verb and North Germanic strong verb - it would be good if they can be kept exactly parallel in terms of structure, headings etc. --Doric Loon 11:50, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merge this into "Germanic strong verb"

IMO the three-way north/west/east article split makes little sense. most info on this page, for example, is not specific to west germanic. it would make more sense to combine all three into a "Germanic strong verb" article, with sections describing the continuations into the various daughter languages. Benwing 04:31, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

I have no objection to that in principle, except for a slight worry about the length. The equivalent articles on East and North Germanic never got written, but they would have been much shorter anyway, I suspect, especially East. Do you think this article can stretch to cover Gothic and Old Norse? The problem with Gothic, of course, is that it has has reduplication in the six classes rather than a seventh class, which could not be tacked on briefly but would certainly become quite a chunky subsection. But OK, you go ahead. --Doric Loon 07:14, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vowel 'length'

..In the later Middle Ages, all three languages eliminated the distinction between the vowels of the singular and plural preterite forms. The new uniform preterite could be based on the vowel of the old preterite singular, or on the old plural, or sometimes on the participle. In English, the distinction remains in the verb "to be": I was, we were. In Dutch, it remains in the verbs of classes 4 & 5, but only in vowel length: ik brak (I broke - short a), wij braken (we broke - long ā).

This discussion is somewhat confused by the (unfortunately ineradicable) nomenclature of Dutch vowels. The distinction between the vowels in brak en braken is not so much a matter of vowel length. The first vowel is IPA: [ɑ] the second one can be either written as [a] or [aː], where the length is not of phonemic distinction, but a matter of emphasis etc. Only in Dutch words where the vowel is followed by 'r' like bord and boord is the vowel really distinguished by length alone [ɔ] vs. [ɔː] resp. (as the orthography seems to indicate). af:Gebruiker:Jcwf

Yes, this is not just a Dutch phenomenon - the same is very much true in English. Most languages which have long/short vowel pairs (typical really of the whole Indo-European family) have qualitative as well as quantitative differences within these pairs, and in the case of English and Dutch, quantity seems to have become markedly less important in distinguishing these phonemes than quality. Historical linguists nevertheless class the pairs according to length, since that is correct from an Indo-European point of view. It is one of the many interesting examples of synchronic and diachronic linguistics analysing things differently - both correctly and for their own very good reasons. I wouldn't want to go into this in this article, but you are welcome to point to a discussion of this at, say, Dutch grammar or vowel length. --Doric Loon 19:54, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Where's Frisian?

Although currently the smallest language of the West Germanic group, Frisian is a West Germanic language. I'm not at all familiar with this language, but shouldn't it at least be mentioned somewhere on this page?

212.159.203.211 11:32, 20 March 2006 (UTC) KH


For the most part, my own feeling is that German, English and Dutch are sufficient to show the general patterns, but you are welcome to disagree. If you have the data, you could add the smaller languages at the bottom of each section: no doubt someone will want Yiddish and Scots and Afrikaans too. But I wouldn't clutter the article with the attempt to include every known variant: if for example Yiddish is only a minor and entirely regular sound shift away from German, it really doesn't need a full account in each section. An alternative would be a short note at the very bottom of the article. --Doric Loon 16:29, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
The distinction between strong and weak verbs has been lost in Afrikaans as all verbs follow the weak pattern. For example the ancestral Dutch hij heeft gezongen has become hy het gesing ("he sang/has sung/had sung). "He sings" is hy sing - as you can see there is no change in vowel sound and it follows the same pattern as hy werk (he works), hy het gewerk (he worked/has worked/had worked). Afrikaans has even lost the inflection that distinguishes the present from the infinitive form of the verb in Dutch. Perhaps this should be mentioned in the article, but I could not find a place where it would go easily without disrupting the article. Booshank 13:11, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dutch verbs 'zitten' and 'zien'

I've added 'zitten' to group 5, as it's in German as well, and follows German 'sitzen': zitten, zat, gezeten. I'm not sure whether Dutch 'zien' (German 'sehen') is originally in this group as well, although it may be reduced in the participle (zien, zag, gezien).

212.159.203.211 11:57, 20 March 2006 (UTC) KH


Quite right, zien should be in there; I've added it with an explanation. --Doric Loon 16:25, 20 March 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Macron

Throughout this article, the long variety of æ is indicated with a grave accent. This is a temporary solution because I couldn't find how to put a macron over this letter. (Other long vowels are marked with a macron: ā, ō etc.) If anyone can substitute the correct symbol it would be a big improvement. --Doric Loon 09:33, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

I changed ǽ to ǣ. In order to make it display right on MSIE, I had to use {{latinx}}. This made the changes a little more error-prone than a simple character substitution; so someone should proofread them. --teb728 06:44, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, that looks great. Though this symbol and a good many others used on the linguistics pages of Wiki are unreadable in my Internet Explorer (even on my brand new state-of-the-art laptop) so that I can only read them using Mozilla. But presumably that will sort itself out in the next generation. Anyway, definite improvement TEB. --Doric Loon 21:05, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Return to merge

As nothing more has been done about Benwig's merge request, it seems time to set the ball rolling. There was no objection, and I personally think he is quite right. As a first step I am moving this article from West Germanic strong verb to Germanic strong verb and fixing the links accordingly. Step two would be for the (minimal) information in East Germanic strong verb and North Germanic strong verb to be merged here, and those two to be turned into redirects. Then, hopefully, fuller details of the East and North variants can be built in here. If in the process the article becomes too long, we can split it in a different way, by taking the detailed survey of each class into an article of its own. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Meanwhile, those of you with North and East Germanic expertise are needed here. --Doric Loon 21:21, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] East and North Germanic

Inspired by a brief discussion on the userpage of Dr. Elwin Ransom I would like to return to this and see whether it is possible to move the article forward. I wrote this almost single-handedly (apart from a few very useful minor corrections by two or three other users) and therefore it concentrates on the languages I know, which are West Germanic. Originally it was actually called West Germanic strong verb, and equivalent East and North Germanic articles were planned, but they were merged when these were never written. (See merge discussion above!) I am not sure that this three-way division would have been a good idea anyway, since recent scholarship suggests the classification of the Germanic languages is more complex than that. But I do definitely still have an ambition to get Norse and Gothic integrated into this, and possibly even more on reconstructed Proto Germanic. Elwin, are you competent to do that? One problem, of course, is that adding detailed descriptions of the verbs in these languages would make a long article very long indeed. One possible solution to this is to move a lot of the detail to sub-articles on the seven classes. But perhaps we should first add the new material and then think about it. Another problem is that Gothic does not have seven classes: class seven appears as a reduplicating sub-class to each of the first six. Since that reflects the original situation in Proto Germanic, it has logical priority, and the West Germanic situation is actually the abberation which should be mentioned second. But how do we then structure the article? --Doric Loon 09:50, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] usage: broadcast

The 2006 Asian Games article treats broadcast as a weak verb, so the past tense is currently spelled broadcasted in the article. I am pretty sure broadcast is a strong verb and the past tense is also spelled broadcast. Does anyone else think this? Ancheta Wis 10:12, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

English irregular verbs listed cast, so I added broadcast 10:20, 18 December 2006 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ancheta Wis (talk • contribs)
Not all irregular verbs are strong. In strong verbs the irregularity results from ablaut, which changes their root vowels. Cast and broadcast are weak verbs in which the dental ending is usually assimilated to the dental of the stem. --teb728 18:51, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

But yes, the correct past tense is broadcast, not broadcasted. --Doric Loon 12:30, 19 December 2006 (UTC)


[edit] reverting anonymous edits

An anonymous user just added a lot of verbs to this article. Many of them are not strong in modern English. Some of them do not even exist in modern English (nim!). Some of them do have related adjectives derived from OLD past strong participles, but that has nothing to do with the question of whether the verbs themselves are still strong. To qualify for entry in this article, a verb must be strong in modern usage, and it goes in under the verb class which it had in Old English. For that reason I have reverted the whole series of edits. That doesn't mean none of them are right, though, and we can talk more. --Doric Loon 22:17, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary lists bide/bode/bided, rive/rived/riven, shrive/shrove/shriven (class 1); fling/flung/flung, grind/ground/ground, ring/rang/rung (class 3); bid/bade/bidden, chide/chid/chid (class 5). It also lists strew/strewed/strewn and string/strung/strung, which I think were originally weak. To my amazement it actually listed nim as a weak verb. --teb728 08:59, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

OK, Webster's is a good enough authority for me here. But after I reverted here I discovered the anonymous had also added "strong" verbs to the List of English irregular verbs including "walk, welk, walken", which makes me think this is just someone having a joke. So from now on I want a dictionary reference for anything which is not obviously our contemporary language. --Doric Loon 15:48, 15 August 2007 (UTC)