Talk:Strong inflection

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I would not have said that there are no strong nouns in English. There are two patterns of nouns which each exhibit just a few nouns each, and a third that possesses two apparent cognates. However, the parallels are so obvious that we can't just necessarily relegate these nouns to irregular classes.

The first pattern (2 nouns):

goose (sg) vs geese (pl)
foot (sg) vs feet (pl)

The second pattern (2 nouns):

mouse (sg) vs mice (pl)
louse (sg) vs lice (pl)

The third pattern (2 nouns):

man (sg) vs men (pl) (cf. German Mann vs Männer)
woman (sg) vs women (pl)

It could be argued that the word woman formed its plural by analogy with man > men. Also, phonetic changes have occurred in some of the words. However, these examples should be enough to demonstrate some patterns, albeit limited ones, in English strong nouns, as well as the existence of these nouns themselves. Also, I have to make mention of the fact that the reason there are no strong adjectives in English is because there are no weak ones, either. Adjectives take no affixes, and they do not inflect for number, case and gender in the way that adjectives in some other languages do. This means that all adjectives in English are invariable, and the distinction between weak and strong adjectives becomes useless for English. thefamouseccles 00:29 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)

A reasonable suggestion - but these aren't classed as strong nouns. Essentially, the definition of strong as meaning that there is a vowel change in the inflected form applies only to verbs. (In Old Norse, many strong nouns, such as himinn, are declined without any vowel changes.) If possible, something substantial about strong nouns and adjectives should be added to the article. (I didn't think I knew enough about it to write any more than I already have.) The Oxford English Dict. says of strong: "Of Teutonic nouns and adjectives: belonging to any of those declensions of which the old Teutonic stem ended otherwise than in n... Some scholars, following the letter of Grimm's definition, inconveniently restrict the term strong to the vocalic stems." NB In Middle English, strong was inflected strong, strenger, strengest, and we still have old, elder, eldest. But again these aren't counted as strong adjectives. Rjp_uk 20:42 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I don't think "woman"-"women" is formed in analogy with "man"-"men", rather, the word "woman" comes from Old English wifman (wif="woman", man="human person", the modern meanings wife="married woman" and man="masculine person" are more recent), so since wifman was a compound to begin with, it has always been conjugated with the similar pattern as the last part of the compound word... http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=woman&searchmode=none

"Strong" does not necessarily have anything to do with vowel changes. The Germanic trong verb shows ablaut, of course, but some Germanic weak verbs also show vowel changes. In German nouns, weak are those with an -n throughout the present stem, and all others - including those with vowel changes, but also including all regular nouns, are "strong", though the word "strong" is not always used here. In Germanic adjectives, the difference is between two parallel systems of inflections, neither of which involve vowel changes. In Hebrew, the meaning is quite different again, but likewise, vowel changes have nothing to do with it. In other words, there is no unifying characteristic for all uses of the word strong, except that it is always the opposite of weak. I have extended the discussion of this in the article on weak (grammatical term), and as "strong" is only meaningful as a counterpoint to "weak" I have cut this article and cross-referenced. No need to say everything twice! There was a request to have the two articles merged completely, but I think this is a good compromise. --Doric Loon 12:52, 28 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Strong adjectives with ablaut?

The current line in the article is "The Germanic strong verb, for example, is characterised by a vowel shift called ablaut, but there is nothing comparable in the German strong adjective inflections". Not true. EN: Old, elder, eldest DE: Alt, älter, ältest; How about DE: Nah, näher, nächsten, related to the words "neighbor" and "next"? samwaltz 06:05, 11 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed... and the idea that there is nothing objective about the term 'strong'... the idea is that 'strong' inflection shows that the words inflect in their own way, not according to any set pattern. Thus "ox" and "oxen" are within a strong noun declension because they do not "succumb" the weak, regular pattern of -s. A 'strong' adj in English would be "elder" which has been replaced mostly by "older", a weakened form that follows the pattern. And of course, verbs also become weakened over time... many English speakers will write "payed" instead of "paid" because there is no similar strong verb to help one remember (in addition to today's poor education). The once-upon-a-time analogous verb "said" is not pronounced the same way, and goes to show that strong means simply "does not follow a predictable pattern".

The current page makes this whole concept sound completely arbitrary and useless, when in fact Germanic languages have *very* specific grammars obsessing over strong vs. weak inflections.

I could be wrong on this, but I believe "ein warmer Tag" and "der warme Tag" are regarded as strong-weak as well... that would have to be checked though. 209.133.83.10 (talk) 23:57, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

First off, the vowel changes in these adjectives are caused by Umlaut, not Ablaut, therefore they are not comparable with strong verbs. (Weak verbs often have vowel changes caused by Umlaut; the point about strong verbs is that they have ABLAUT changes.)

More importantly, you have to look in actual grammar books and see how the actual terms are used. I don't believe you will find a grammar book where ox:oxen is described as a strong noun.

This is terminology which is used in various ways in different languages. If you follow the links from here to specific phenomena (e.g. Germanic strong verb) you will find that it is not at all wishy-washy. However if you try to look across all the languages and try to find a common feature of everything which is called "strong", the only constant is that it is always paired with something called "weak". The actual word "strong" doesn't mean very much as a grammatical term until you put it in a context. I think the point of this article is simply to collect the various ways it can be used, and point to other articles which deal with them. That's all we can say about this. --Doric Loon (talk) 19:56, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Also, since strong and weak only make sense in a dialectic, it is sensible to have one discussion for both. For this reason, the main discussion is at weak inflection. It is right that this page should be kept short, with a cross-reference to that one. --Doric Loon (talk) 20:01, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I thought ablaut was the changing of the vowel to indicate a change in tense, as in give ---> gave, whereas umlaut is the change in vowel sound indicated by a certain diacritic, as in o ---> ö. Since the umlaut changes the vowel sound, it could be used to indicate a change in verb tense and would in such cases therefore be an instance of the idea of ablaut. (Now that I think of it, many strong verbs in German change vowels not only to change the tense, but in some cases to change the person, e.g. nehmen ---> nimmt. So maybe the definition above should be emended to include that.) Michael Hardy (talk) 20:32, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Nehmen > nimm is Umlaut. Nehmen > nahm and genommen is Ablaut. You would have to read Germanic Umlaut and Indo-European ablaut and probably Germanic strong verb and possibly Germanic weak verb to understand all the implications of the difference, but they should be kept separate. For historical linguists they are quite different things. I don't think an explanation of that can or should be put into this article, which for the reasons mentioned above should be kept short, but we can create more links to the articles which do give the explanations if you like. --Doric Loon (talk) 23:24, 11 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The concept of umlaut I'm familiar with involves a change in pronunciation of a vowel indicated by putting a diaresis consisting of two dots above it; e.g. ö. Michael Hardy (talk) 00:33, 12 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Umlaut is the fronting of a vowel in the stem of a word under the influence of a front vowel in the ending. The Germanic word for foot was fot, and its plural was foti, a fairly widespread plural ending. Over time the plural became feti because it was easier to pronounce if the stem vowel was closer to the vowel in the ending. THAT is umlaut. In the modern language the ending has disappeared leaving the fronted vowel as the sole marker of the plural: feet. It is still Umlaut if the reason for it has become invisible. German has developed a system of marking Umlaut with two dots (Fuß, Füße), but the dots are not the important thing when we are discussing the results of Umlaut in the paradigms of "irregular" nouns or verbs. --Doric Loon (talk) 11:18, 12 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Link to List, Please

I know that Wikipedia had a list of English strong verbs (a vital reference), though perhaps someone got rid of it. If it's here, I now have to search for it, since there is no link on this page and the category redirects don't help. Could someone please add a link to the correct Wikipedia page? And some links to external lists would help too. Kilyle 08:25, 3 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think it was moved to wiktionary. --Doric Loon (talk) 19:58, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]