drig, drag, drug

[Herbert Stahlke]

How many classes there are depends on whose grammar
 you're going by.  The traditional seven goes back to the
seven major strong verb classes of OE, which doesn't
 work well even for OE, since there are other minor
 classes as well.  But for learning OE, the seven are a
 good preliminary breakdown.

 Greenbaum's 1996 Oxford English Grammar has more (I've
 forgotten the number and I don't have the grammar handy
 at the internet cafe in Vilnius), based entirely on
 patterns in Modern English.

 But it's useful to keep strong/weak separate from
 regular/irregular.  Strong/weak is a distinction that
 Grimm made to distinguish between forms he attributed to
 Ur-Indo-Germanisch, roughly Proto-Indo-European.  The
 ablaut, or vowel-changing forms without a dental suffix
 were strong.  Anything with a dental suffix was weak,
 the dental suffix being a specifically Germanic
 innovation.  His use of strong vs. weak goes back to his
 Rousseau-influenced romantic nationalism, which led him,
 and his brother, to try to reconstruct the language and
 culture of the culturally pure ancestors of the modern
 speakers of Indo-Germanic, as he called them, languages.

 Within any modern Germanic languages there are
 irregularities in verbs the develop within strong or
 weak or across them, like go/went/gone, in an extreme
 case.  I like especially the seeming restoration of a
 preterite plural with sneak, snuck (pret. sg.), snook
 (pret. pl., rhymes with took), snuck (past part.).  From
 a recent thread on this, this pret. pl. seems to occur
 in the Buffalo area as well as in Central Indiana and in
 the Santa Monica area.

 Herb
 > On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, James A. Landau wrote:
 >
 > #An irregular English verb is sometimes called a "strong verb",
presumably
> #because it has the strength to avoid conformity.  You might invent the
term
> #"strengthening a verb" but I don't recommend it.  Nor would I recommend
> #"irregularize"---it just wouldn't make tense to me.
>
> Technically, strong verbs are not the same as irregular verbs. In the
> Germanic languages many verbs change the vowel in the stem to form the
> past tense and/or the past participle:
>
>         drink/drank/drunk
>         sing/sang/sung
>
>         fly/flew/flown
>
>         ride/rode/ridden
>
>         think/thought/thought
>
> I think there are seven classes of these. "Drig/drag/drug" seems to be
> imitating the class of "drink/drank/drunk", which iirc is historically
> inaccurate because the verbs of this class all end in "ing" or "ink" in
> the present tense. Not that historical accuracy is of any relevance
> here!
>
> The other funny thing about "drig/drag/drug" is that it changes the
> present tense; it was a joke, yes? There are real "neo-strong" forms,
> like "dove" (past of "dive") and "shat" (past/pp of "shit"), but I've
> never heard of changing the stem in the present tense.
>
 > Note that none of these examples use the regular, or "weak", ending
> "-(e)d" in either of the inflected forms. "Walk" is a weak verb:
>
 >         walk/walked/walked
>
> "Have" and "go" are irregular:
>
>         have/had/had
>         go/went/gone
>
> IIRC, the past tense "went" was suppletive, originally from the
> now-obsolete verb "wend", which when used at all is conjugated weakly:
>
>         wend/wended/wended
>
> If I were at home I would have appropriate reference material from which
> to flood you with accurate data, but I would also be undergoing physical
> and mental meltdown in the brutal heat we're having in the Northeast.
>
> -- Mark A. Mandel
>   Linguist at Large