Герман тілдеріндегі етістіктердің даму тарихы

Verb form derived from common earlier Germanic languages

The Germanic language family is one of the language groups that resulted from the breakup of Proto Indo European (PIE). It in turn divided into North, West and East Germanic groups, and ultimately produced a large group of mediaeval and modern languages, most importantly: Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (North); English, Dutch and German (West); and Gothic (East, extinct). The Germanic verb system lends itself to both descriptive (synchronic) and historical (diachronic) comparative analysis. This overview article is intended to lead into a series of specialist articles discussing historical aspects of these verbs, showing how they developed out of PIE, and how they came to have their present diversity.

The so called preterite present verbs are a small group of anomalous verbs in the Germanic languages in which the present tense shows the form of the strong preterite. The preterite of the preterite present verbs is weak. As an example, take the third person forms of modern German können "to be able to." Kann "can, am/is able to" (present tense) displays the vowel change and lack of a personal ending that would otherwise mark a strong preterite. Konnte "could, was able to" (preterite) displays the dental suffix of the weak preterites.

A special case is wiljaną (to want, will), which has its present tense forms from the IE optative. Today, the optative survives in the subjunctive of the Germanic languages. In Faroese, it is confined to the present tense and used only as a conjunctive.

When teaching modern languages, it is usually most useful to have a narrow definition of a "regular verb" and treat all other groups as irregular. See the article irregular verb. Thus for example, most text books for learning English or German treat all strong verbs as irregular, and only the most straightforward weak verb counts as regular. In historical linguistics, however, regular patterns are examined diachronically, and verbs tend only to be described as "irregular" when such patterns cannot be found. Most of the supposedly "irregular" Germanic verbs belong to historical categories that are regular within their own terms. However, the suppletive verbs are irregular by any standard, and for most purposes the preterite presents can also count as irregular. Beyond this, isolated irregularities occur in all Germanic languages in both the strong and the weak verb system.