Ablaut used in a sentence

Ablaut in a sentence as a noun

The author of the article is suggesting that we use these weird ablaut/umlaut morphs in place of the preterite. For example, "I thought" would then become "I thunk".

The rule of course then goes deeper, into ablaut reduplication and so on. People master spoken English without knowing anything [0] about it.

And, of course, ablaut preservation in strong verbs: "singen, sang, gesungen". English somehow managed to preserve this particular barrel of fun.

Proto-indo-european also had extensive use of ablaut, and a dual number.

If you read his post carefully, you'll see that the author isn't aware of distinction between past simple and present perfect, let alone of ablaut: he confuses "swam" and "swum" and then proceeds to use the newly invented past tense form of "cutch" in present perfect. 3.

That seems quite a stretch, when proto-Indo-European ablaut explains the exact same phenomenon. Also, Germanic strong verbs tend to be relatively primitive vocabulary -- go, sleep, drink, sing...

German has many of the same ablaut series as english, so where english has sink-sank-sunk and wink-winked-winked, the corresponding german cognates have sinken-sank-gesunken and winken-winkte-gewinkt. But many people now use the early 70ies joke "gewunken" and think that "gewinkt" sounds weird.

Quote Examples using Ablaut

Some people call ablaut verbs irregular, but almost all of them are in fact regular. They only seem irregular because there are relatively few of them left to group together [1]. But I'm not aware of any language with a single pattern of conjugation. Many have 10 or more. 1. Ex.: Drive-drove-driven, write-wrote-written, ride-rode-ridden, etc. While they follow a different conjugation pattern, most ablaut verbs are perfectly regular.

Anonymous

It's thought to be a combination of colloquialisms + the Indo-European ablaut system, wherein vowels would change depending on conjugation. Consider how many English irregular verbs follow a pattern. Sing, sang, sung. Ring, rang, rung. These are ablaut conjugations.

Anonymous