A
strong inflectionIn grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
is a system of verb conjugation or noun/adjective
declensionIn linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
which can be contrasted with an alternative system in the same language, which is then known as a
weak inflectionIn grammar, the term weak is used in opposition to the term strong to designate a conjugation or declension when a language has two parallel systems...
. The term
strong was coined with reference to the
Germanic verbThe Germanic language family is one of the language groups that resulted from the breakup of Proto-Indo-European . 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...
, but has since been used of other phenomena in these and other languages, which may or may not be analogous. Note that there is nothing objectively "strong" about a strong form; the term is only meaningful in opposition to "weak" as a means of distinguishing paradigms within a single language. Nor is there any distinguishing feature common to all strong forms, except that they are always counterpoints to "weak" ones.
The
Germanic strong verbIn the Germanic languages, a strong verb is one which marks its past tense by means of ablaut. In English, these are verbs like sing, sang, sung...
, occurring in Germanic languages including German and English, is characterised by a vowel shift called
ablautIn linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
. Examples in English include
give/gave, come/came, fall/fell. There is nothing comparable in the German strong adjective inflections. For a full discussion of this distinction see
weak inflectionIn grammar, the term weak is used in opposition to the term strong to designate a conjugation or declension when a language has two parallel systems...
.
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