Germanic Weak Verb - General Description

General Description

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 or similar. (For comparative purposes we may refer to this generally as a dental, although in some of the languages, including most varieties of English, /t/ and /d/ are alveolar rather than dental consonants.) In all Germanic languages, the preterite and past participle forms of weak verbs are formed from the same stem. For example:

Infinitive Preterite Past Participle
English (regular) to love loved loved
to laugh laughed laughed
English (irregular) to say said said
to send sent sent
to buy bought bought
to set set set
German lieben (love) liebte geliebt
bringen (bring) brachte gebracht

Historically, the pronunciation of the suffix in the vast majority of weak verbs (all four classes) was, although in most sources discussing Proto-Germanic it is spelled by convention. In the West Germanic languages, this suffix hardened to, but it remained a fricative in the other early Germanic languages (Gothic and Old Norse).

In English, the dental is a /d/ after a voiced consonant (loved) or vowel (laid), and a /t/ after a voiceless consonant (laughed), though English uses the spelling in regardless of pronunciation, with the exception of a few verbs with irregular spellings.

In Dutch, /t/ and /d/ are distributed as in English provided there is a following vowel, but when there is no following vowel, terminal devoicing causes the pronunciation /t/ in all cases. Nevertheless, Dutch does distinguish the spellings in and even in final position. See the 't kofschip rule.

In Afrikaans, which descends from Dutch, the past tense has fallen out of use altogether, and the past participle is marked only with the prefix ge-. Therefore, the suffix has disappeared along with the forms that originally contained it.

In German the dental is always /t/, and always spelled , as a result of the third phase of the High German consonant shift (d→t).

In Icelandic, the dental has remained a voiced dental fricative /ð/ in the form it was inherited from Old Norse.

The situation of early Norwegian was similar to Icelandic, but intervocalic /ð/ eventually disappeared. In the verbs where it remains, the dental is /t/, /d/, depending on conjugation class and dialect. It is spelled accordingly. In Nynorsk, it can be different in the preterite and the past participle.

Swedish is very similar to Norwegian, although the dental is retained in the spelling, even between vowels. Some informal spellings indicate a lost dental, such as in sa ("said") from the standard spelling sade.

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