Ingvaeonic Nasal-spirant Law

In historical linguistics, the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (also called the Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic nasal spirant law) is a description of a phonological development that occurred in the Ingvaeonic dialects of the West Germanic languages. This includes Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon, and to a lesser degree Old Dutch (Old Low Franconian).

Overview

The sound change affected sequences of vowel + nasal consonant + fricative consonant. ("Spirant" is an older term for "fricative".) The sequences in question are ''-ns-'', ''-mf-'', and ''-nþ-'', preceded by any vowel. The nasal consonant disappeared, sometimes causing nasalization and compensatory lengthening of the vowel before it. The nasalization disappeared relatively soon after in many dialects along the coast, but it was retained long enough to prevent Anglo-Frisian brightening of to . The resulting long nasalized vowel was rounded to in most languages under various circumstances.

In Old Saxon on the other hand, the nasal consonant is later restored in all but a small handful of forms, so that Old Saxon ('five') appears as in all Middle Low German dialects, while Old Saxon ('mouth') appears as in all Middle Low German dialects. The Old Saxon words ('goose') and ('us') appear variably with and without a restored consonant, an example being the combination of and on the Baltic coast.

The sequence ''-nh-'' had already undergone a similar change in late Proto-Germanic several hundred years earlier, and affected all Germanic languages, not only the Ingvaeonic subgroup (see Germanic spirant law). The result of this earlier change was the same: a long nasal vowel. However, the nasalization in this earlier case did not cause rounding of nasal in Old Saxon, which instead became simple , while the later Ingvaeonic spirant law resulted in . In Old English and Old Frisian, rounding occurred here as well, giving in both cases. It was this earlier shift that created the n/∅ in ''think/thought'' and ''bring/brought''.

Examples

Compare the first person plural pronoun "us" in various old Germanic languages:
:

Gothic represents East Germanic, and its correspondence to German and Standard Dutch shows it retains the more conservative form. The /n/ has disappeared in English, Frisian, Old Saxon (New Low German has both ''us'' and ''uns''), and dialectal Dutch with compensatory lengthening of the /u/. This phenomenon is therefore observable throughout the "Ingvaeonic" languages. It does not affect High German, East Germanic or North Germanic.

Likewise:
* Germanic *''tanþs'' > English ''tooth'', North Frisian ''tôs'', ''toss'' (vs. Low German ''Tähn'', Dutch, Danish, and Swedish ''tand'', German ''Zahn'', Icelandic ''tönn'').
* Germanic *''anþeraz'' > English ''other'', Icelandic ''aðrir'', West Frisian ''oar'', West Flemish (Frans-Vlaams) ''aajer'', Old Saxon ''ōðar'', ''āthar'' (vs. Low German ''anner'', German/Dutch ''ander'' � > d Icelandic: ''annað/annar/önnur'', Swedish ''annat/annan/andre/andra'', Danish ''anden/andet/andre'').
* Germanic *''gans'' > English ''goose'', West Frisian ''goes'', ''guos'', Low German ''Goos'' (vs. Dutch ''gans'', German ''Gans'').
* Germanic *''fimf'' > English ''five'', West Frisian ''fiif'', East Frisian ''fieuw'', Dutch ''vijf'', Low German ''fiew, fiev, fief'' (vs. German ''fünf'', Icelandic ''fimm'', Danish and Swedish ''fem'').
* Germanic *''samftō'', -''ijaz'' > English ''soft'', West Frisian ''sêft'', Low German ''sacht'', Dutch ''zacht'' t > xt(vs. German ''sanft'').

English

English shows the results of the shift consistently throughout its repertoire of native lexemes. One consequence of this is that English has very few words ending in ''-nth''; those that exist must have entered the vocabulary subsequent to the productive period of the nasal spirant law:
*''month'' - derives from Old English (compare German ); the intervening vowel rendered the law inapplicable here.
*''tenth'' - from Middle English . The original Germanic , which was regularised to *''tehunþô'' in early Ingvaeonic, was affected by the law, producing Old English , (Modern English ''tithe''). But the force of analogy with the cardinal number ''ten'' caused Middle English speakers to recreate the regular ordinal and re-insert the nasal consonant.
*''plinth'' - a loanword in Modern English from Greek ( "brick, tile").
*''amaranth'' - a double loanword from Greek, "ἀμάραντος" (undying) + "ἄνθος" (flower).
Likewise, the rare occurrences of the combinations -nf-, -mf- and -ns- have similar explanations.
*''answer'' - originally had an intervening stop: Old English , cf. Dutch ''antwoord'', German ''Antwort''.
*''unfair'' - the prefix un- is still productive.

Dutch

Although Dutch is based mostly on the Hollandic dialects, which in turn were influenced by Frisian, it was also heavily influenced by the Brabantian dialect which tends not to show a shift. As a result, the shift is generally not applied but is still applied to some words. For example Dutch ''vijf'' vs. German ''fünf'', ''zacht'' vs. ''sanft''. Coastal dialects of Dutch tend to have more examples, e.g. standard Dutch ''mond'' "mouth" vs. Hollandic ''mui'' (earlier ''muide'') "slit between sandbanks where tidal streams flow into". Brabantian dialects tend to have fewer examples, having unshifted examples in a few cases where standard Dutch has the shift, as in the toponyms ''Zonderwijk'' (Veldhoven), ''Zondereigen'' (Baarle-Hertog), etc. cognate to standard Dutch ''zuid'' "south".

German

The spirant law was originally active in Central Franconian dialects of High German, which is proof that it was not entirely restricted to Ingvaeonic. Compare for example Luxembourgish ("us"), ''Gaus'' ("goose", now archaic). Modern Standard German is based more on eastern varieties which are not affected by the shift. The standard language does, however, contain a number of Low German borrowings with it. For example ''Süden'' ("south", ousting Old High German ), or ''sacht'' ("soft, gentle", alongside native ''sanft'').

In some High and Highest Alemannic German dialects, there is a similar phenomenon called Staub's law, for example ("us", Standard German ''uns''), ''füüf'' ("five", Standard German ''fünf''), or ''treiche'' ("drink", Standard German ''trinken'').

References

* Bremmer Jr, Rolf H. ''An Introduction to Old Frisian. History, Grammar, Reader, Glossary.'' (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2009.)
* Markey, Thomas L. ''Germanic dialect grouping and the position of Ingvæonic.''(Inst. f. Sprachwissenschaft d. Univ. Innsbruck, 1976.)
* Ringe, Donald R. and Taylor, Ann (2014). ''The Development of Old English - A Linguistic History of English, vol. II'', 632p. . Oxford.

{{Germanic languages

West Germanic languages
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Sound laws