
Originally Posted by
Morphology Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), one of the two fairy-tale–collecting brothers from Germany who were also famous grammarians, chose the names strong verbs and weak verbs for the two dominant patterns of verbs in the Germanic languages. Those he called strong made their past tenses and past participles mainly by changing medial vowels, as do English begin, began, begun and drive, drove, driven. His weak verbs made their tense changes by adding various forms of the dental suffix, as in English study, studied, studied and bake, baked, baked.