2825: A Strong and Weak Verb Sep 14, 2024

Usually, a verb is either weak, meaning it has an affixed morphological change for (usually) tense, like bike-biked, while strong verbs have an internal vowel change like sing-sang-sung. In German, the verb ‘bewegen’ displays an interesting morphosyntactic divergence: it behaves as a strong verb when used in the sense of “to persuade” (past tense bewog, subjunctive bewöge), but as a weak verb when meaning “to move” (bewegte, bewegt). This split likely reflects a process of semantic differentiation within the language, where older, strong conjugations tend to be preserved in metaphorical or abstract meanings (like “to persuade”), while the more literal usage (like “to move”) has shifted towards a weak pattern. This sort of pattern exists in English, but usually the later-occurring and more metaphoric type meaning is the one to be weak, which is not the case with ‘bewegen’.