Talk:Germanic strong verb

Old English imperative sing.: NOT bêode, but bêod  Nuremberg 12.06.2023  Angel.Garcia2001 ~ ~ ~ ~

To == Vowel 'length' == In the later Middle Ages, all three languages eliminated the distinction between the vowels of the singular and plural preterite forms. This is wrong. Icelandic, Faeroese, Classical Rikssvenska retain the sing. / plural distinction, as much as some conservative German dialects. Nuremberg 12. 06. 2023 Ángel García2001 ~ ~ ~ ~  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.225.95.213 (talk) 14:52, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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?

212.59.203.211 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)

thank you and please enjoy this!!!$

From Dutch to Afrikaans

 * 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)


 * Ok I decided to do it; I added a bullet From Dutch to Afrikaans. Dave (djkernen)|Talk to me|Please help! 22:51, 3 September 2011 (UTC)
 * It could definitely be expanded, as Afrikaans has many verbs with an irregular past participle (e.g. bedorwe, bevrore, gebroke, gedaan, gedwonge, geskrewe, gesproke, gestorwe, geswolle, oorlede), which contrary to Dutch are often used alongside the regular (bederfde, gebreekte, etc.) past participle. The tendency is that the strong participle is more figurative (or sometimes only used in fixed expressions), so e.g. bederfde yoghurt (spoiled yoghurt) but bedorwe jeug (spoiled youth), gebroke hart (broken heart) but gebreekte vaas (broken vase). 132.229.234.46 (talk) 16:41, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I am the same user as above despite the different IP address. I'll add a nuance to that; the virtual institute for Afrikaans remarks: " Voltooide deelwoorde kan natuurlik swak of sterk wees. Swak voltooide deelwoorde kry net die voorvoegsel en/of -de of -te, soos in die voorbeelde hier bo. Sterk verlede deelwoorde se stam verander ook. Voorbeelde daarvan is verworwe (van verwerf), bedorwe (van bederf) en geswore (van sweer).
 * Vinnige syspoor: Die opvatting dat sterk voltooide deelwoorde altyd ’n figuurlike betekenis het, is nie 100% akkuraat nie. Ons praat byvoorbeeld van bevrore groente en aangenome kinders. Soms is die sterk voltooide deelwoord nou maar net meer gebruiklik. "
 * Translated: "Past participles can of course be weak or strong. Weak past participle just receive the prefix (ge-) and/or -de or -te, as in the examples above. Strong past participles' stems change as well. Examples thereof are verworwe (from verwerf (acquire)), bedorwe (from bederf (spoil)) and geswore (from sweer (swear)).
 * Quick side track: The notion that strong past participle always have a figurative meaning, is not 100% accurate. We speak for instance of bevrore groente (frozen vegetables) and aangenome kinders (adopted children). Sometimes the strong past participle just happens to be more common."
 * https://viva-afrikaans.org/lees-luister/blog/item/1346-om-te-de-of-te-te
 * Furthermore, modal verbs tend to have a strong past tense, and a handful of other verbs do so too. Grammatically speaking though, the distinction between a simple past and a past perfect does not exist anymore. For this reason, verbs almost never retain both a strong past tense and a strong past participle. The exception is wees 'to be', which does retain both was 'was/were' and gewees 'been', as well as a present tense is 'am/is/are' distinct from the infinitive. (The verb wees also has the alternative infinitive syn as well as the subjunctive forms sy and ware in a few fixed phrases and words, like welsyn 'wellbeing', hoe dit ook al sy 'be that as it may', and as 't ware 'as it were/so to speak'/)
 * I'll add a few words about it. 132.229.187.14 (talk) 13:48, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)


 * Five years later, this merge looks like a big mistake. Nothing has been added about North and East Germanic strong verbs. Therefore, this article should be renamed West Germanic strong verb.--213.236.196.39 (talk) 16:00, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
 * No, information about North and East Germanic should be added. —Angr (talk) 18:18, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
 * In principle, I'm with Angr on this, but if fully developed this page could end up way too long for anyone who wants a quick overview rather than the fully gory detail. Still, I suppose we can worry about that when we get there. --Pfold (talk) 16:46, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

fixes to modern english
I made a bunch of fixes to the verbs claimed to be in various classes in Modern English. Many archaic verbs were listed; a number of verbs were in the wrong classes (e.g. wake, weave); a number of verbs that now form their principal parts according to the Old English class 1 weak pattern (e.g. meet, let, sleep) were wrongly listed as strong verbs. Benwing (talk) 00:27, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

Most Common in Dutch
The paragraph read:

Some verbs, which might be termed "semi-strong", have formed a weak preterite but retained the strong participle, or rarely vice versa. This type of verb is the most common in Dutch:

Doric Loon edited it to read:

Some verbs, which might be termed "semi-strong", have formed a weak preterite but retained the strong participle, or rarely vice versa. This type of verb is most common in Dutch:

(Notice the missing "the" at the end.)

This changes the meaning of the sentence, and as this is a subtlety of English and this page in particular has (I hope!) a strong international presence, I thought it might be useful to discuss.

The first version (with the) means that of all the Dutch verbs, the semi-strong verb is the most common. The second version (without the) means that of all the languages with semi-strong verbs, Dutch is the language where they are most often found.

So: which is it?

Thanks, Dave (djkernen)|Talk to me|Please help! 17:46, 23 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Semi-strong verbs are definitely not the most common of Dutch verbs. Weak verbs are the most common, with strong verbs coming second. So I think the second meaning is what is intended. CodeCat (talk) 22:37, 23 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks CodeCat. I know it seems like I was splitting hairs but, well, that's what I do ;-) Dave (djkernen)|Talk to me|Please help! 02:27, 24 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I like hair-splitters! It was me that wrote this sentence way back, and it was certainly my intention not to have the definite article in there. Either that was a typo or somebody added it. (Too lazy to go back through the history and check.) So the second meaning is correct. These semi-strong verbs do not exist in English, but there is a tiny group of them in German, and there is a larger tiny group in Dutch. --Doric Loon (talk) 11:01, 24 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Not exactly tiny but still small. Wiktionary has 60 of them... wikt:Category:Dutch mixed verbs CodeCat (talk) 22:12, 24 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Wow! 60?
 * BTW, I should point out that the phrase "semi-strong verb" was my coinage. I used it for convenience when I started this article, but included a note that it was not a technical term. That caveat has disappeared. Of course I would be delighted and flattered if the phrase catches on; but until you see it in an academic text book, treat it purely as a descriptive formulation. --Doric Loon (talk) 16:40, 27 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Reminds me of semi-soft cheese. Angr (talk) 17:00, 27 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I think at the time I was thinking of semi-skimmed milk :-) --Doric Loon (talk) 17:44, 27 September 2011 (UTC)


 * List of English irregular verbs includes several verbs that can have a weak preterite and strong participle, or vice versa. Among them are bequeath, crow, lade, mow, prove, saw, sew, shape, show, and upswell. Additionally, there are quite a few verbs that can be conjugated both as weak and as strong verbs, and I wouldn't be surprised if some people mix these, sometimes using one form in the preterite and another in the participle.


 * Moreover, while I don't know how the frequency compares with Dutch, it is also fairly common in Scandinavian languages. For instance, see in Norwegian bokmål is se, and is conjugated se - ser - så - sett. A difference from Dutch could be that, in Scandinavia, a strong preterite and a weak participle is by far the most common way around. These verbs are generally categorized and treated as strong verbs.--213.236.196.39 (talk) 14:37, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't think the scandinavian languages are a good example. In Old Norse (from which they descend), the default form of the participle ended in -t (which is from the adjective inflection, compare that), and it's that -t which now appears in scandinavian verbs. Moreover, it appears in all past participles, even the strong ones, but only in their default form, not when used in agreement with a subject. For example Swedish jag har fallit "I have fallen" but de fallna äpplena "the fallen apples". CodeCat (talk) 17:28, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Vocabulary issue
The final column heading in the table in the "Verb Classes" section has the phrase "Class Inspired into Germanic".

What does this mean? "Inspired into" is non-standard English and doesn't seem to mean anything. And it also doesn't appear that "inspired" is being used in its original, Latin meaning of "breathe [life] into" (because that would require a different word order or structure). [One may inspire someone (direct object), be inspired by someone or something (passive construction), or be inspired to do something (infinitive of result or purpose), but "inspired into"? Why the implied movement? --Is this a usage parallel drawn from/inspired by "forced into"?]

Why not simply "Germanic Class" as a heading?

And, speaking of splitting hairs (sub "Most Common in Dutch", above), "It was me that wrote" should be "It was I who wrote".

(Yes, I do yell at the television whenever a split infinitive, dangling modifier or failure-to-use-the-subjunctive be heard! It's a wonder I'm not hoarse...)

--Polemyx (talk) 12:54, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

dubious PIE forms
Quite a few of the PIE forms seem dubious and contradict, say, Ringe's description in that they pre-suppose PIE forms that stand in regular sound correspondences with the Proto-Germanic forms. This includes the perfect plural ending (which was *-e:r and not *-nd in PIE) and the ablaut *-e:- in the perfect plural stem of the 4th and 5th classes (which should have had a zero grade instead), both of which Ringe explains as late analogies, the latter involving a laryngeal (p.193, pp.186-187 respectively). The vowel of the past participle of the 5th class should have had a zero-grade too, though Ringe thinks this change had "almost certainly" happened already in late PIE (p.187). The vowel *-o- preceding the *-no- participle ending is also a secondary Germanic development in his view (p.193).--91.148.130.233 (talk) 13:33, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
 * This is true... But if we use the actual PIE forms, we risk losing sight of what we're really trying to explain in this article, which is the ablaut alternation patterns. The reconstructions for PIE could be limited only to the parts that haven't been remodelled between PIE and PG, which would usually be the stem, but that still wouldn't help with the lengthened grade. Maybe we should not use the term 'PIE' but instead 'Pre-Germanic'? CodeCat (talk) 19:49, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Personally, I'd go for the first option (and just ignore the lengthened grade); perhaps one could mention separately the PIE precursors of the endings, etc.. However, in any case, the remodelled parts should be indicated as such, and that as soon as possible, because the current exposition is bound to mislead people to get an incorrect idea about PIE verbal morphology. Most of our readers are not already experts in this and would be likely to take the forms labelled PIE at face value. I think "Pre-Germanic" would still be factually inaccurate, since the morphological remodellings did not necessarily precede each and every Germanic sound change that remains unreflected in the forms currently labelled "PIE" in this article. --91.148.130.233 (talk) 11:54, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
 * One change that did happen is the creation of new perfect-aspect forms for roots that originally lacked them. If we wanted to be entirely correct, we'd have to leave many past tenses blank altogether because PIE had no corresponding form. I don't see how that would be any more helpful for explaining the Germanic forms than just listing the stem ablaut. CodeCat (talk) 11:59, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, re-creating a possible lexeme (and the different aspect versions of the verb were originally such) does not seem as bad to me as using morphonological patterns that never existed. "I took all the redges and twingled them into the lox" is not really misleading about the structure of the English, unlike, say, "I takavi alla thos booklar muta-throw-and they boxina-toin". Really, something - anything of what we've discussed in terms of possibilities, some clarifying notes, whatever - does need to be done urgently; every reader who visits this page is being misled as we are speaking. So why don't I just do it myself, if I think it's so important? Because I am not an active Wikipedian devoted the project, just a lazy passer-by with too much other stuff on his hands; and this looks like a long and painful edit. But really, coming up with new learned considerations while the very basic confusion in the article remains unchanged is useless. Maybe I'll come back and do something eventually, maybe I won't, but in any case, the best scenario would be if someone like you did it before that.--91.148.130.233 (talk) 18:43, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Major restructuring
I'm afraid I don't like the major restructuring that was done November 3. A lot of information that I refer to once in a while has disappeared. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 11:41, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
 * What would you like to be added back in? CodeCat (talk) 17:47, 14 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Well, everything that I added in the last eight months, for starters! It's hard to see what you took out because when I request to see the differences between your version and the previous version, I get a comparison that shows that a sentence was removed in the first paragraph, and then after that there's nothing in common. Whatever you kept is not recognized by the comparison program because it loses all "synchronization" between the two versions. Let's put it this way -- the article was interesting and had a lot of detailed information. Now I don't find a lot of that. Maybe we should put it back the way it was, and then we can discuss what to take out? Eric Kvaalen (talk) 10:18, 16 November 2013 (UTC)


 * As the person who originally wrote the old version (a lot of detail was added by other users, but it was still pretty much my text) I have to say that the restructuring is a definite improvement. It may make it harder to compare one particular verb over several languages, but it makes it a lot easier to get an overview of any one language, and it solves the problem I always had of not being able to fit Gothic into the article structure. So well done. It seems to me that most of the data has been kept, but a few things may have slipped out. But that's the kind of thing that happens when a reorganization takes place. Maybe Eric can identify what else he sees missing? --Doric Loon (talk) 19:12, 16 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I have just done a big edit putting back a lot of what was taken out. But I'm still not really satisfied. As Doric Loon says, in the previous version it was possible to compare what happened in the various languages with each class of verb. I think there's still a lot of material missing on how each class developed in Old English or Old High German or Old Saxon. People did a lot of work on this article which was simply removed!
 * Here's a link to the old version:
 * It would be nice to have more on the Nordic languages by the way.
 * Can one of you check my recent edit of been? A user called Stardsen put in a conjugation table which looked dubious to me.
 * Eric Kvaalen (talk) 19:49, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Restructuring revisited
I'm curious why we have a reference to an older version of the article? I followed that link, and the detail on the seven verb classes is informative and interesting, even if Gothic doesn't fit neatly into it. This seems like an awful lot of information to remove, and I would have to imagine that "see the previous version of this article" is not a sanctioned reference by Wikipedia standards. Although I generally defer to the opinion of the original author, that certainly calls into question Doric Loon's assertion that the restructuring was an improvement.

I'm wary of trying to integrate that information back into the present version of the article, as I am not sure I could do so coherently. But it would be nice to clear this up and remove the link to the 2013 revision. Stian (talk) 03:46, 9 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Hi, I take your point. Obviously, as the first author of the old version, I rather liked what I had done. But as people kept adding material, the article became overly long. What one could do, if there is a desire to get back to the situation where a verb can be compared across different languages and to have as many examples as possible, would be to create seven more specialized articles on "Germanic verb, class I" etc. Then you can re-introduce the material that has been lost, and this article would be a general introduction pointing to those more detailed ones. That also allows us to have both: an article structured by languages and articles structured by verb classes. At the end of the day, though, it is hard to have everything. --Doric Loon (talk) 17:36, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Swedish - last tense all mistakes
I assume it's about modern languages, if nothing else is stated. In the table of Swedish Germanic strong verb, it seems to me like someone has had a look in the wrong column of a wider table of some kind. For intance to bite (Swedish "att bita") was bend : bita - bet - biten English: bite - bit - bitten but the last Swedish "biten" isn't correct. "I have bitten you" (here bitten is a verb). But isn't the same as "I am bitten" and correct Swedish is bita - bet - bitit It rather means to have being bitten. A better example "flugen" doesn't correspond to "flewn" as it should, correct Swedish is "flygit". To be "sugen" means "craving", correct Swedish in this context is "sugit". The last tense in the Swedish table is totally wrong. Or was. I made no change to "kväda", a word I don't understand at all. Boeing720 (talk) 03:19, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * biten is a proper Swedish word and it's cognate to all the others in the table, so I don't see the problem. Rua (mew) 17:18, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm native in Swedish. Not from Stockholm, but anyone there would still agree with me, in this case. First I'm not aware of what's meant by Part 1,2,3 and 4. Nevertheless I'm sorry, you have not quite understood "Part 4" in Swedish. I take three of the verbs from the table in order to help you. To them I have added a fouth one. Beginning with the common tenses

Part 4 in sentences:
 * bita - bet - bitit (biten ?) <=> bite - bet - bitten
 * flyga - flög - flygit (flugen ?) <=> fly - flew - flown
 * binda - band - bundit (bunden ?) <=> bind - band - bound
 * springa - sprang - sprungit (sprungen ?) <=> run - ran - ran
 * "Jag blev biten av en orm" - I was bitten by a snake
 * "Ormen har bitit mig" - The snake has bitten me
 * "Jag blev flugen till Berlin" - I was flown to Berlin
 * "Jag har flygit till Berlin" - I have flown to Berlin
 * "Jag blev bunden med ett rep" - I was bound with a rope
 * "Jag har bundit honom" - I have bound him
 * "Jag blev sprungen" - I was ran (...)
 * "Jag har sprungit fortare" - I have ran faster
 * "Jag blev sprungen" - I was ran (...)
 * "Jag har sprungit fortare" - I have ran faster
 * "Jag har sprungit fortare" - I have ran faster

The forms earlier used in the Part 4 table were all passive, and especially "flugen" (and "sprungen") are very difficult to put into a sentence. If you wish to express "I have flown to Berlin many times" in Swedish by saying "Jag har flugen till Berlin många gånger" you would simply not be understood. It is at that level. The passive forms can only be used with few verbs, but the normal form can always be used. Can't see any reason to omit the normal for the rare. Boeing720 (talk) 09:17, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
 * You're completely missing the point. The forms given in the page are not about what they mean but how they evolved. Notice the forms given for all other languages are those descending from the Proto-Germanic ending *-anaz, which is part 4. Swedish should show the same form. Please stop messing with the page. Rua (mew) 12:03, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
 * It's YOU who do not get the point. Most words you defended by you for Part 4 column simply can't be used, has a different significance (compared to the English explanation), are invented here - and a few remaining "part 4" I have accounted for above. (Current but passive forms, and NOT what's intended or expected here). Part 4 did not show any past tense. Typically the words "har" (have/has), "hade" (had) or "skulle" (should) should stand before them. The Danish table is correct however. And you say we should use the same form/tense for all languages... I've now for the third or fourth time written down the correct forms, which also correspond to the Danish table. SAOB (Svenska Akademins Ordbok, the word book of the Swedish Academy, is no source. It began on letter A in 1893 and is currently at letter V - you cant find "zoologi" (zoology) in it. Several huge spelling rules and grammar changes makes it outdated. SAOL (Svenska Akademins Ordlista, the word list of the Swedish Academy) is however usable - one volume is printed every year. See https://svenska.se/ - I've checked all remaining words (as verbs, "substantiv = noun) Boeing720 (talk) 15:04, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I have to agree with Rua that Boeing720 doesn't understand the point and has too high self-confidence to understand that he, due to insufficient knowledge of linguistics, doesn't understand it. (Even though he does admit that he doesn't understand a few things, but he also seems to think that he doesn't need to understand them.) Swedish is unique in having split the original past participle into a true past participle, preserving the reflex of the *-anaz ending in the masculine&feminine, and the so-called supine, which is used to form the perfect tenses ('with har/hade before them') and represents a variant of the neuter form of the participle. The past participles of many verbs aren't used, so people usually cite the supine when describing the paradigm of a strong verb in modern Swedish. What is best for describing modern Swedish is, however, not necessarily best for the comparative historical purposes of this article. Here the past participle is more suitable than the supine. Using löpte-löpt (new weak-verb forms) is particularly useless.--87.126.23.210 (talk) 14:15, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
 * The real past participle, cross-linguistically, is precisely the form that has passive meaning and can be used with 'be/become'. The use with 'have' to express a perfect, however frequent, is secondary.--87.126.23.210 (talk) 14:41, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
 * That doesn't even matter in this case. The table shows the forms that descend from the Germanic form in *-anaz, regardless of what its function is nowadays. Rua (mew) 15:20, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
 * On second thoughts, it might be worth it to preferentially use verbs whose past participles do occur commonly and/or to add some sort of footnote explaining that many of the forms do not occur commonly outside of prefix formations or compounds. While Boeing720's attitude of militant ignorance was irritating, I can see that a native speaker *will* tend to be puzzled by seeing them out of context. Many of them occur mostly in combination with particles and prefixes, because only those can change the imperfective Aktionsart of the verb into perfective and make a past participle meaningful - utflugen, erfaren, anhållen, förgråten; that could be pointed out, too. --87.126.23.210 (talk) 18:09, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

"hugge" in Danish
hugge - hug - hugget is wrong. I wonder how that entry came about. &mdash; fnielsen (talk) 14:43, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Principal part numbering
This article uses two contradictory systems for principal part numbering. They are both defensible, but we don't really want a situation where at the top we introduce the parts on a five-part system, and further down we use a four-part system, whereby part 4 in the former is part 3 in the latter etc. It will be relatively easy to fix this, but it would be good to have consensus about which system is most common usage. Then we can either change 2 to 1a in the overview at the top, or change the numbers in the discussion to match the overview. Doric Loon (talk) 12:30, 12 February 2023 (UTC)