Ingvaeonic Nasal-spirant Law
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historical linguistics Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # ...
, the
Ingvaeonic North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic , is a postulated grouping of the northern West Germanic languages that consists of Old Frisian, Old English, and Old Saxon, and their descendants. Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Ge ...
nasal spirant law (also called the
Anglo-Frisian The Anglo-Frisian languages are the Anglic (English, Scots, and Yola) and Frisian varieties of the West Germanic languages. The Anglo-Frisian languages are distinct from other West Germanic languages due to several sound changes: besides the ...
or North Sea Germanic nasal spirant law) is a description of a
phonological development Phonological development refers to how children learn to organize sounds into meaning or language (phonology) during their stages of growth. Sound is at the beginning of language learning. Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and ...
that occurred in the
Ingvaeonic North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic , is a postulated grouping of the northern West Germanic languages that consists of Old Frisian, Old English, and Old Saxon, and their descendants. Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Ge ...
dialects of the
West Germanic languages The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic languages, Germanic family of languages (the others being the North Germanic languages, North Germanic and the extinct East Germanic languages, East Germanic ...
. This includes
Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
,
Old Frisian Old Frisian was a West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries along the North Sea coast, roughly between the mouths of the Rhine and Weser rivers. The Frisian settlers on the coast of South Jutland (today's Northern Friesl ...
, and
Old Saxon Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German (spoken nowadays in Northern Germany, the northeastern Netherlands, southern Denmark, the Americas and parts of Eastern Europe). It i ...
, and to a lesser degree
Old Dutch In linguistics, Old Dutch (Dutch: Oudnederlands) or Old Low Franconian (Dutch: Oudnederfrankisch) is the set of Franconian dialects (i.e. dialects that evolved from Frankish) spoken in the Low Countries during the Early Middle Ages, from aroun ...
(Old Low Franconian).


Overview

The sound change affected sequences of
vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
+ nasal consonant +
fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
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 In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internationa ...
and
compensatory lengthening Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable. Lengthening triggered ...
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 Middle Low German or Middle Saxon (autonym: ''Sassisch'', i.e. " Saxon", Standard High German: ', Modern Dutch: ') is a developmental stage of Low German. It developed from the Old Saxon language in the Middle Ages and has been documented i ...
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 Germanic spirant law, or Primärberührung, is a specific historical instance in linguistics of dissimilation that occurred as part of an exception of Grimm's law in Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Ge ...
). 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 East or Orient is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from the fac ...
, 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 Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable. Lengthening triggered ...
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 Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English p ...
. 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 In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality (size) of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number: the number of elements in the set. Th ...
''ten'' caused Middle English speakers to recreate the regular ordinal and re-insert the nasal consonant. *''plinth'' - a loanword in Modern English from
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
( "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 Hollandic or Hollandish ( ) is the most widely spoken dialect of the Dutch language. Hollandic is among the Central Dutch dialects. Other important language varieties of spoken Low Franconian languages are Brabantian, Flemish (East Flemish, West ...
dialects, which in turn were influenced by Frisian, it was also heavily influenced by the
Brabantian Brabantian or Brabantish, also Brabantic or Brabantine ( nl, Brabants, Standard Dutch pronunciation: , ), is a dialect group of the Dutch language. It is named after the historical Duchy of Brabant, which corresponded mainly to the Dutch provi ...
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 Veldhoven () is a municipality and town on the Gender in the southern Netherlands, just southwest of Eindhoven. Topography Dutch topographic map of Veldhoven (town), Dec. 2013 Population centres The modern town of Veldhoven is an agglomerat ...
), ''Zondereigen'' (
Baarle-Hertog (; french: Baerle-Duc, ) is a Flemish municipality of Belgium, much of which consists of a number of small Belgian enclaves fully surrounded by the Netherlands. Parts of are surrounded by the Dutch province of North Brabant, but it is part of t ...
), etc. cognate to standard Dutch ''zuid'' "south".


German

The spirant law was originally active in Central Franconian dialects of
High German The High German dialects (german: hochdeutsche Mundarten), or simply High German (); not to be confused with Standard High German which is commonly also called ''High German'', comprise the varieties of German spoken south of the Benrath and ...
, which is proof that it was not entirely restricted to Ingvaeonic. Compare for example
Luxembourgish Luxembourgish ( ; also ''Luxemburgish'', ''Luxembourgian'', ''Letzebu(e)rgesch''; Luxembourgish: ) is a West Germanic language that is spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 400,000 people speak Luxembourgish worldwide. As a standard form of th ...
("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 : : : : : (70,000) (30,000) (8,000) , familycolor = Indo-European , fam2 = Germanic , fam3 = West Germanic , fam4 = North Sea Germanic , ancestor = Old Saxon , ancestor2 = Middle L ...
borrowings with it. For example ''Süden'' ("south", ousting
Old High German Old High German (OHG; german: Althochdeutsch (Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 750 to 1050. There is no standardised or supra-regional form of German at this period, and Old High ...
), or ''sacht'' ("soft, gentle", alongside native ''sanft''). In some
High High may refer to: Science and technology * Height * High (atmospheric), a high-pressure area * High (computability), a quality of a Turing degree, in computability theory * High (tectonics), in geology an area where relative tectonic uplift ...
and
Highest Alemannic German Highest Alemannic is a branch of Alemannic German and is often considered to be part of the German language, even though mutual intelligibility with Standard German and other non-Alemannic German dialects is very limited. Highest Alemannic dialect ...
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 Language histories Old English Sound laws