In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel. A minority of verbs in any Germanic In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel. A minority of verbs in any Germanic language are strong; the majority are weak verbs, which form the past tense by means of a dental suffix. In modern English, strong verbs include sing (present I sing, past I sang, past participle I have sung) and drive (present I drive, past I drov The "drive" conjugation The "choose" conjugation The "bind" conjugation The "bear" conjugation The "give" conjugation The "shake" conjugation The "fall" conjugation However, they are normally referred to by numbers alone. In Proto-Germanic, the common ancestor of the Germanic languages, the strong verbs were still mostly regular. The classes continued largely intact in Old English and the other older historical Germanic languages: Gothic, Old High German and Old Norse. However, idiosyncrasies of the phonological changes led to a growing number of subgroups. Also, once the ablaut system ceased to be productive, there was a decline in the speakers' awareness of the regularity of the system. That led to anomalous forms and the six big classes lost their cohesion. This process has advanced furthest in English, but in some other modern Germanic languages (such as German), the seven classes are still fairly well preserved and recognisable. The reverse process in which anomalies are eliminated and subgroups reunited by the force of analogy is called "levelling", and it can be seen at various points in the history of the verb classes. In the later Middle Ages, German, Dutch and English eliminated a great part of the old 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, on the old plural, or sometimes on the participle. In The key distinction is that the system of strong verbs has its origin in the earliest sound system of Proto-Indo-European, whereas weak verbs use a dental ending (in English usually -ed or -t) that developed later with the branching off of Proto-Germanic. The "strong" vs. "weak" terminology was coined by the German philologist Jacob Grimm in the 1800s, and the terms "strong verb" and "weak verb" are direct translations of the original German terms starkes Verb and schwaches Verb. == Origin and development == Strong verbs have their origin in the ancestral Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language. This is in turn based mostly on the type of consonants that follow the vowel. The Anglo-Saxon scholar Henry Sweet gave names to the seven classes: The "drive" conjugation The "choose" conjugation The "bind" conjugation The "bear" conjugation The "give" conjugation The "shake" conjugation The "fall" conjugation However, they are normally referred to by numbers alone. In Proto-Germanic, the common ancestor of the Germanic languages, the strong verbs were still mostly regular. The classes continued largely intact in Old English and the other older historical Germanic languages: Gothic, Old High German and Old Norse. However, idiosyncrasies of the phonological changes led to a growing number of subgroups. Also, once the ablaut system ceased to be productive, there was a decline in the speakers' awareness of the regularity of the system. That led to anomalous forms and the six big classes lost their cohesion. This process has advanced furthest in English, but in some other modern Germanic languages (such as German), the seven classes are still fairly well preserved and recognisable. The reverse process in which anomalies are eliminated and subgroups reunited by the force of analogy is called "levelling", and it can be seen at various points in the history of the verb classes. the preterite of to help is (weer) hólpe for the plural but either (ich) halp or (ich) hólp for the singular. In the process of development of English, numerous sound changes and analogical developments have fragmented the classes to the extent that most of them no longer have any coherence: only classes 1, 3 and 4 still have significant subclasses that follow uniform patterns. Before looking at the seven classes individually, the general developments that affected all of them will be noted. The following phonological changes that occurred between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic are relevant for the discussion of the ablaut system. The verb bid (in the sense of "to offer") was in Class 2, but now the past and past participle are bid. The obsolete verb forlese is now used only as the passive participle forlorn. Class 3 Class 3 in English is still fairly large and regular. The past is formed either from the old past singular or from the past plural. Many of the verbs have two past forms, one of which may be dialectal or archaic (begin, drink, ring, shrink, sing, slink, spin, spring, stink, swing, swim and wring). Get, speak, tread and weave (weave, and occasionally tread, can also be weak) were originally of class 5, whereas swear was originally class 6. Wake was also originally class 6, and in fact retains the "a" of the present tense – the preterite woke (Middle English wook) only conforms to the modern class 4 preterite, not to the historic class 4 preterite in "a". The verb come is anomalous in all the West Germanic languages because it originally began with qu-, and the subsequent loss of the w sound coloured the vowel of the present stem. modern English "come came come", compared to Old English cuman cymþ – cōm cōmon – cumen and Middle English comen – cam or com – comen. From Middle Dutch to Modern Dutch: Diphthongisation of long high vowels: /iː/ > /ɛi/, /yː/ > /œy/ (spelled <ij> and <ui>) Monophthongisation of opening diphthongs: /iə/ > /i/, /uə/ > /u/ (still spelled <ie> and <oe>) Class 1 This class is well preserved and has the most strong verbs. Not