3.7 Strong verbs — the seven ablaut classes — Epoché
What you will be able to do Recognise that German strong verbs and English irregular verbs are the same verbs, changing in the same way, for the same reason — singen · sang · gesungen against sing, sang, sung . Name the seven classes, say what defines each one, and place an unfamiliar strong verb in a class from the shape of its stem: schreiben , trinken , geben , tragen . Give the three principal parts of sixty of the commonest strong verbs — sprechen · sprach · gesprochen , fallen · fiel · gefallen — and say why German dictionaries print exactly three and not two or four. Predict, in most cases, whether a strong verb's participle will keep the vowel of the infinitive — tragen · trug · getragen — or take a new one: reiten · ritt · geritten . Prerequisites : 3.6 — you need both helpers and the shape of the participle, because the participles in this lesson end in -en rather than -t and that is the one thing about them you would not have guessed. English has about a hundred and eighty irregular verbs. You did not learn them from a table; you absorbed them, and you can produce sang rather than singed without a moment's thought. German has about two hundred verbs of the same kind. They are, to an extent that surprises people, the same verbs : sing, drink, ride, write, speak, break, give, see, eat, fall, hold, come, go, stand, sit, lie. And the change they make is the same change, inherited from the common ancestor of both languages, which is why sing, sang, sung and the German for it line up vowel for vowel. Grammarians call the change ablaut, and the seven classes are its seven surviving patterns. This is the one place in the German verb system where an English speaker starts with a genuine structural advantage over a learner from any non-Germanic language, and this lesson is built to cash that advantage in. Every class below is introduced through the English verbs that belong to it. The term "strong verb" is worth explaining, because it sounds like a value judgement. A strong verb marks its past by changing its own vowel: it is strong enough to do the work internally. A weak verb needs an ending bolted on from outside — the -t of the last two lessons, the -ed of English. The terms come from nineteenth-century German philology and they are now standard in English grammars too, so they are worth having. The three principal parts A German dictionary prints three forms for a strong verb: the infinitive, the one-word past, and the participle. That is exactly the set English grammars print — write, wrote, written — and for the same reason: three forms are the minimum from which everything else can be generated, and no two of them reliably predict the third. The one-word past is the tense you will meet in the reading volume and use in writing. Lesson 3.8 gives you the eight verbs whose one-word past survives in ordinary speech; for the rest, you need the form in order to read, and you should learn it now because learning it later means learning every verb twice. The participle of a strong verb ends in -en , not in -t . The front wrapper works exactly as it did in the last two lessons — present when the verb begins with its own stressed syllable, absent after an unstressed prefix — so the only new thing here is the ending and the vowel. What about the present tense? It is not a fourth principal part, because it is predictable: a strong verb of certain classes changes its stem vowel in the second and third persons singular, and that is the change you learnt in lesson 3.3. Notice which classes those are as you read the table below, because the correspondence is not a coincidence: the stem-changing verbs of lesson 3.3 are strong verbs, and a weak verb never does it. Table The seven classes, one row each, with an English member of the class beside the German one. Read the two columns against each other; the point of this table is the parallel, not the German alone. Class · German pattern The same class in English I — schreiben · schrieb · geschrieben write, wrote, written ; ride, rode, ridden II — fliegen · flog · geflogen freeze, froze, frozen ; choose, chose, chosen III — singen · sang · gesungen sing, sang, sung ; drink, drank, drunk IV — sprechen · sprach · gesprochen speak, spoke, spoken ; break, broke, broken V — geben · gab · gegeben give, gave, given ; see, saw, seen VI — tragen · trug · getragen slay, slew, slain ; take, took, taken VII — fallen · fiel · gefallen fall, fell, fallen ; hold, held, held Now the same information as a description of each class, so that you can place a verb you have not met. Class What defines it I Infinitive has ei . Past and participle share one vowel: ie when the following consonant is single and soft, a short i when it is a hard one or a cluster — with exceptions such as schneiden → schnitt II Infinitive mostly has ie or eu ; a few verbs have another vowel, such as lügen . Past and participle both have o III Infinitive has i or e followed by a nasal or a liquid plus another consonant. Past has a ; participle has u before a nasal plus another consonant ( gesungen , getrunken , gefunden ) and o before a doubled nasal or a liquid ( begonnen , geschwommen , geholfen ) IV Infinitive has e , mostly followed by a single liquid or nasal ( nehmen , stehlen ); a few common verbs have ch or ff there instead ( sprechen , brechen , treffen ). Past has a long a ; participle has o V Infinitive mostly has e followed by a consonant that is neither a liquid nor a nasal; bitten , liegen and sitzen belong here with i or ie . Past has a long a ; ★participle has e — the vowel of the infinitive for the e -verbs, and e also for bitten , liegen and sitzen ( gebeten , gelegen , gesessen ) VI Infinitive has a . Past has u ; ★participle returns to a VII Various vowels in the infinitive. Past mostly has ie , sometimes i ( fangen → fing , hängen → hing ); ★participle mostly returns to the vowel of the infinitive ( gefangen ), though not in hängen → gehangen Read the three starred rows toge