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New verbs in English are invariably regular. Sneak, an old verb in English dating from the 16th century, is one of the very few that have, at least in some parts of the world, become irregular (with snuck now competing with sneaked), and only in the last 100 years.

Are there any truly new arrivals (by which I mean only to exclude established verbs with new prefix uses) of irregular or strong verbs in German?

Wrzlprmft
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CrimsonDark
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  • According to Wiktionary, "snuck" was formed by analogy with "struck". Similarly "dove" (less common) was formed (presumably) by analogy with "drove". The Old English snican is also strong but with a different vowel change, so it was regularized and then deregularized The point is that the overall trend is toward regularization, with exceptions being due to similarities with common irregular verbs. – RDBury Oct 27 '20 at 19:38
  • @RDBury Interesting. Burchfield, in Fowler's Modern English Usage (Oxford Press) says, "Meanwhile, no one has satisfactorily accounted for the origin of snuck: there is no other verb in the language with the infinitive -eek or -eak and pa.t. -uck. Consider the following verbs: creak, freak, leak, peak, peek, reek, seek, squeak, streak, wreak,, also shriek. None of them has shown any sign of following the path of sneak by acquiring a new pa.t. form. – CrimsonDark Oct 27 '20 at 23:48
  • @ user02814 If I may say so, it very much sounds to me that the principle behind giving rise to the sneak-snuck combination is also vowel gradation: stick-stuck, tik-tok, click-clock, sneak-snuck? –  Oct 28 '20 at 00:37
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    I have never heard "snuck" (or "dove") used in British English - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/snuck – chasly - supports Monica Oct 28 '20 at 11:30
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    Getting a bit away from the point, but fwiw they're ("snuck" - although I think I'd have spelt it "snook", personally - and "dove") my default past tense forms for those verbs (32 y/o, lived in NW England from birth until early 20s). – Chris H Oct 28 '20 at 12:10
  • 'snuck' is American-English (regional, southern) slang (think Mark Twain), not British-English. Similarly 'thunk' for 'thought', 'lay' for 'lie', 'warnt' for 'wasn't/weren't', 'done gone' instead of 'went' or 'has gone'. Answers might want to consider how AmE and BrE branched away from each other since the 16th century. – smci Oct 28 '20 at 19:18
  • @smci https://youtu.be/PJVNzwTnfbk – David Vogt Oct 28 '20 at 23:01
  • In English, new irregular verbs may be formed by combining with old irregular verbs. So rerun, reran dates only to 1804 in the Oxford English Dictionary. – Gerald Edgar Feb 03 '23 at 13:09

3 Answers3

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Just like in English, this section of grammar in German has hardly experienced any substantial additions or expansion for a long time now as the principles that brought about these irregular verbs were only actively applied in the very early days of the Germanic languages. There is the, somewhat funny, Gesellschaft zur Stärkung der Verben (Society for the Irregularisation of Verbs) trying to account for the lack of development here.

Similarly to sneak/sneaked vs. sneak/snuck, the only comparative German counterpart I can think of right now is winken/winkte/gewinkt vs. winken/(wunk)/gewunken (to wave) which is most likely to enter eventually into generally accepted usage (if it hasn’t already) to coexist then with the regular version.

Apart from this more or less unique new creation and addition, at times you could hear mix-ups of largely homophonic verbs because of the ignorance of possible differences:

  • hängen/hing/gehangen vs. hängen/hängte/gehängt: The former is the intransitive version of hängen; the latter is the transitive one. So, they differ in that you would either have something/be hanging (hing) or make something hanging (hängte).

  • leiden/litt/gelitten vs. leiten/leitete/geleitet: Ever so often, mathematicians ignore the origin of the word ableiten (to differentiate) and say things like abgelitten. I would say this is just a spleen with various individuals coming from mathematical professions because they likely have never considered the possibility of a lapse of memory here.

  • genießen/genoss/genossen vs. niesen/nieste/geniest: By the spur of the moment, at times people say (jokingly) genossen (enjoyed) instead of geniest (sneezed).

  • schleifen/schliff/geschliffen vs. schleifen/schleifte/geschleift: Sometimes people mix up the former (meaning to hone, e.g. a piece of metal) with the latter (meaning to slight, e.g., a fortress).

It is also quite often the case that the past participle in German is produced erroneously while the main point to look at here is the actual intention of using one version or the other, i.e. by state or progression of the action implied by the verb.

Although being lexicalised with only one, many regular verbs are occasionally used with a different past participle in German. For example, abgeschaltet vs. abgeschalten (to switch off [e.g. the television]) stems from the regular verb schalten which is conjugated with either of the two auxiliary verbs in German (sein/haben). It should be conjugated accordingly as follows:

Der Fernseher ist abgeschaltet.
Der Fernseher hat abgeschaltet.

There is also the tendency to use:

*Der Fernseher ist abgeschalten.

This stems in all likelihood from the non-obvious difference in usage of the auxiliary verbs with irregular verbs: ist gesprungen / hat gestanden / hat gesprochen / hat geschwiegen / ist geschritten / ist gelaufen.

In general, making use of the vowel gradation (Ablautreihe) is so much easier to achieve physiopsychologically while speaking that one could also quite often hear new Starke Verben being produced, that is new irregular verbs created ad-hoc.

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    Welcome to German Language SE and thank you for your answer. I edited it quite a bit because I found it difficult to extract what you were aiming at and some sentences were very convoluted. Please check whether everything is still according to your intentions. – Wrzlprmft Oct 27 '20 at 12:42
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    The schleifte/geschleift form also has the more common meaning of "to drag". – phipsgabler Oct 27 '20 at 14:46
  • It might be useful to give a yas/no answer at the top. – user2705196 Oct 27 '20 at 22:29
  • @ user46563 Welcome! How wonderful for me to return from work to find such a surprising and comprehensive answer! winken (!). Great! – CrimsonDark Oct 27 '20 at 23:53
  • @ user02814 Thank you. I am glad my answer has been informative to you. –  Oct 28 '20 at 00:42
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    I would like to challenge the claim contained in "at times people say (jokingly) genossen (enjoyed) instead of geniest (sneezed)", viz., that "genossen" is just a joke. What's the basis for this challenge? Several Swiss-German dialects -- and especially Walliser-Deutsch (which is mostly pure Mittelhochdeutsch with a few Althochdeutsch components thrown in for good measure) -- definitely use "ernosse'" and "g'nosse'" as the past participle of "niesen". Thus, "genossen" in Neuhochdeutsch may actually be a proper hold-over from older locutions rather than just a joke. – Mico Oct 28 '20 at 06:21
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    "abgeschalten"? Really? Never heard that ... – Hagen von Eitzen Oct 28 '20 at 07:26
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    @Hagen I use it all the time. It only feels wrong when thinking longer about it. – Bergi Oct 28 '20 at 09:29
  • I have used "abgelitten" in the mathematical term when I was studying (decades ago), and always as a little pun. Most native-speaking people either didn't notice at all, or if they did, they seemed to get it. – AnoE Oct 29 '20 at 11:28
  • Abwiegen vs abwägen is being mixed up so often these days; it still makes me cringe.. – TaW Oct 29 '20 at 13:47
  • Very nice pointing out cases like «abgeschalten». A similar case to «gewunken» is «abgestummen». A case more similar to “snuck” would be the unetymological preterite «frug». – mach Oct 30 '20 at 07:10
  • The pun with “abgelitten” - as I have heard it - was to emphasise that the computation of the particular derivative in question was rather painful. But it’s not very common I’d say. – senegrom Oct 30 '20 at 10:45
  • Note that "abgeschalten", or the base form "geschalten", "eingeschalten" and so on, seems to be commonly used in Austria, at least in some parts of the country. That's where I heard it - an Austrian company is one of our customers in building automation and they say it a lot. Another word they taught me which I never heard of before is Stiegenhausschaltung (the standard German term is Treppenhausschaltung), i.e. a light that is switched on when pressing the button and stays on for some time before switching off again. Then it's ausgeschalten. – OregonGhost Nov 02 '20 at 15:49
  • How does one slight a fortress? – Kyralessa Nov 11 '20 at 12:31
  • @Kyralessa: See Wiktionary, Meaning 5. – Wrzlprmft Nov 11 '20 at 12:36
  • @Wrzlprmft The page has the equivalent of [citation needed]. But actually Wikipedia has a lot more information anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slighting – Kyralessa Nov 11 '20 at 12:58
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Many English verbs in the IT are not translated in the current German. For example

  • scannen (to scan)
  • pushen (to push)
  • pullen (to pull)

Their perfekt-form should be "gescannt", "gepusht", and so on, if they would be used as regular verbs. But they are not. My current experience is that many native German speakers build a half German/half English version of the perfekt-form: "gescanned", "gepushed" and so on.

These can be considered irregular verbs, although maybe regular, but half-English verb would be more accurate.

peterh
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  • It might be worthwhile to note that for most (?) German speakers there is no real difference in pronunciation between "gescannt" and "gescanned". – Emil Oct 29 '20 at 08:21
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I taught German at an American university and the faculty used the verb “droppen” to express the concept of dropping a class - “Wieviele haben schon gedroppt?”.

As an kind of inside joke, some of us made it (very oddly) irregular: droppen drap gedrupt - ich droppe, du dröpst, usw. There was also a competing faction in the department that preferred “dropieren” :)

Heinrich
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    "dropieren" is schwyzerdütsch. – Kakturus Oct 28 '20 at 14:05
  • My experience with ad hoc "-ieren" constructions is that native speakers do not understand them, even if the meaning looks for me trivial. Maybe in Schwyz it could go better. I think the competing fraction made the same mistake, but had no native speakers to test it on. – peterh Nov 19 '20 at 19:16