{"id":110724,"date":"2025-01-07T07:00:01","date_gmt":"2025-01-07T15:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=110724"},"modified":"2025-01-07T12:22:10","modified_gmt":"2025-01-07T20:22:10","slug":"20250107-01","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20250107-01\/?p=110724","title":{"rendered":"Gesellschaft zur Stärkung der Verben: The German Society for the Irregularization of Verbs"},"content":{"rendered":"

The German-language (?) organization Gesellschaft zur St\u00e4rkung der Verben<\/i><\/a> (the Society for the Irregularization of Verbs) advocates for the conversion of regular verbs to irregular, and more generally for the reintroduction of irregular forms to the German language.<\/p>\n

The linguistic term for irregular verbs in Germanic languages is “strong”, as opposed to regular or “weak” verbs. More formally, a “strong” verb is one that forms tenses by changes to the vowel rather than by adding a dental suffix (“-t” or “-d”). You can see this in English, with irregular verbs like sing, sang, sung<\/i> changing the vowel, and regular verbs like jump, jumped, jumped<\/i> adding an “-ed” suffix.<\/p>\n

For example, in modern standard German, the verb sterben<\/i> (to die) conjugates as sterben, starb, gestorben<\/i>, but the seemingly analogous verb erben<\/i> (to inherit) is a regular verb: erben, erbte, geerbt<\/i>. But why so weak and feeble? Let’s make these weak verbs strong and proud:\u00b9 erben, arb, georben<\/i>!<\/p>\n

An English-language equivalent would be changing the regular verb bake<\/i> from bake, baked, baked<\/i> to bake, book, baken<\/i> to match the irregular verb take, took, taken<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The name for their reformed version of German is “Neutsch”, but they leave ambiguous whether this is a portmanteau for Neues Deutsch<\/i> (new German) or Nicht Deutsch<\/i> (not German). I think we’re better off not knowing.<\/p>\n

\u00b9 The society’s name is a pun, since it literally translates as “Society for the Strengthening of Verbs”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stand strong and proud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-110724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Stand strong and proud.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}