3.3 Stem-changing verbs — e→i, a→ä — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say which two of the six rows of a German present tense can change their stem vowel — du siehst , er sieht — and be confident that the other four never do. Produce the three changes from the infinitive of any of the twenty-four verbs here: e becoming i — du gibst — e becoming the two letters ie — du liest — and a back vowel taking two dots: er trägt . Recognise the four verbs whose change brings a spelling complication with it, and write them correctly: er nimmt , er isst , er hält , er vergisst . Look up an unfamiliar German verb in a dictionary and read off, from the abbreviations printed there, whether it changes its stem. Prerequisites : 3.2 — you have already seen one of these changes, in the second and third persons singular of the verb meaning "to become", and you need those three verbs anyway because half the sentences below use them as helpers. In the last lesson you learnt three verbs whose stems misbehave. You may have concluded that German irregularity is an unruly pile to be memorised item by item. It is not. There is one mechanism, it affects exactly two of the six rows, it is entirely predictable once you know which verbs belong to the club, and it is the same mechanism you have been using in English your whole life without noticing. Here is the mechanism in one sentence: in a group of common verbs, the vowel of the stem changes in the second and third persons singular and in no other cell of the present tense. Not in the first person singular. Not in any plural. Two cells out of six, always the same two, and the change is the same for every verb in a given group. Why those two cells? Because the endings -st and -t once began with a vowel that pulled the stem vowel towards it, a thousand years before anybody wrote the endings down in their modern form. The pulling vowel later disappeared; the pulled vowel stayed pulled. That is the whole of the history, and the reason it is worth a sentence is that it tells you where to expect the change and why it does not spread to the plural. The English speaker's advantage English has the same fossil. Man and men , foot and feet , mouse and mice , goose and geese : in each pair the plural is marked by a change in the vowel, not by an ending. The mechanism is exactly the one described above — a vowel in a lost ending pulled the vowel of the stem forward — and the English pairs are its survivors. So when you look at a German verb whose second and third persons singular have a different vowel from the rest, you are not looking at chaos. You are looking at the same sound change that gave you feet , still working in the verb system because German kept it there. The number of English nouns that do this is down to about eight. The number of German verbs that do it is in the low hundreds, of which perhaps fifty matter and twenty-four are in this lesson. One consequence is practical and immediate. If you can remember that the change lives in the second and third persons singular, you can generate the forms rather than memorising them, and you will not make the commonest learner error, which is to spread the change into the plural. A learner who says the equivalent of "we speaks" has made a grammatical mistake. A learner who puts the changed vowel into the plural has made the German equivalent, and it sounds just as wrong. Table Three tables, one for each type of change. Read each down its column and pay attention only to rows two and three; the rest of the column is the regular present tense from lesson 3.1. Person Present — sprechen , to speak ( e becomes i ) 1 sg ich spreche 2 sg du sprichst 3 sg er, sie, es spricht 1 pl wir sprechen 2 pl ihr sprecht 3 pl sie sprechen Person Present — lesen , to read ( e becomes ie ) 1 sg ich lese 2 sg du liest 3 sg er, sie, es liest 1 pl wir lesen 2 pl ihr lest 3 pl sie lesen Person Present — fahren , to drive (back vowel takes two dots) 1 sg ich fahre 2 sg du fährst 3 sg er, sie, es fährt 1 pl wir fahren 2 pl ihr fahrt 3 pl sie fahren Look at the second table again, at rows two and three. They are the same word. When the stem already ends in s , the second person singular ending cannot add another one, so the two rows fall together — and that is a real ambiguity in the language, not a misprint. The same thing happens to every verb whose stem ends in a sibilant, and the subject pronoun is what tells the two apart. How to read the endings The endings themselves have not changed. They are still the six you learnt: -e , -st , -t , -en , -t , -en . Nothing in this lesson touches them. What changes is the stem they are hung on, in two cells, and the safe way to think about it is that these verbs have two stems: a plain one for four rows and a changed one for two. The three changes, stated as spelling rules, are these. An e in the stem becomes i ( geben → gibt , sprechen → spricht ) or, in a few verbs, ie ( lesen → liest , sehen → sieht ); which of the two a verb takes mostly follows the length of the vowel: a long e usually gives ie ( lesen , sehen , stehlen ), a short one gives i ( sprechen , helfen ), and geben and nehmen have a long e and still take i . An a takes the two dots, and so does the pair of letters that spells the sound in English house . A fourth change, o → ö , is found only in stoßen ( er stößt ); a verb with any other stem vowel does not do this at all, which rules out most of the dictionary at a stroke. How do you know whether a given verb is in the club? In the long run you know because you have heard it. In the short run a dictionary tells you: German dictionaries print the changed third person singular next to the infinitive for exactly these verbs, and a verb printed without one does not change. Get into the habit of reading that field. It costs a second and it saves a wrong form that will otherwise become a habit. Four verbs in the list below bring a spelling complication with the change, and they are worth isolating because each one catches learners separately.