Germanic strong verb

In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is one which marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel (ablaut). The majority of the remaining verbs form the past tense by means of a dental suffix (e.g. -ed in English), and are known as weak verbs. A third, much smaller, class comprises the preterite-present verbs, which are continued in the English auxiliary verbs, e.g. can/could, shall/should, may/might, must. The ""strong"" vs. ""weak"" terminology was coined by the German philologist Jacob Grimm, and the terms ""strong verb"" and ""weak verb"" are direct translations of the original German terms ""starkes Verb"" and ""schwaches Verb"".In modern English, strong verbs are verbs such as sing, sang, sung or drive, drove, driven, as opposed to weak verbs such as open, opened, opened or hit, hit, hit. Not all verbs with a change in the stem vowel are strong verbs, however; they may also be irregular weak verbs such as bring, brought, brought or keep, kept, kept. The key distinction is the presence or absence of the final dental (-d- or -t-), although there are strong verbs whose past tense ends in a dental as well (such as bit, got, hid and trod). Strong verbs often have the ending ""-(e)n"" in the past participle, but this also cannot be used as an absolute criterion.In Proto-Germanic, strong and weak verbs were clearly distinguished from each other in their conjugation, and the strong verbs were grouped into seven coherent classes. Originally, the strong verbs were largely regular, and in most cases all of the principal parts of a strong verb of a given class could be reliably predicted from the infinitive. This system was continued largely intact in Old English and the other older historical Germanic languages, e.g. Gothic, Old High German and Old Norse. The coherency of this system is still present in modern German and Dutch and some of the other conservative modern Germanic languages. For example, in German and Dutch, strong verbs are consistently marked with a past participle in -en, while weak verbs in German have a past participle in -t and in Dutch in -t or -d. In English, however, the original regular strong conjugations have largely disintegrated, with the result that in modern English grammar, a distinction between strong and weak verbs is less useful than a distinction between ""regular"" and ""irregular"" verbs.