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Holtzmann's Law
Holtzmann's law is a Proto-Germanic sound law originally noted by Adolf Holtzmann in 1838. It is also known by its traditional German name ''Verschärfung'' (literally: "sharpening"). (A similar sound law which has affected modern Faroese, called ''skerping'' in Faroese itself, is also known as "Faroese ''Verschärfung''" in English.) Description and occurrences The law involves the gemination, or doubling, of PIE semivowels (glides) ' and ' in strong prosodic positions into Proto-Germanic ' and ', which had two outcomes: * hardening into occlusive onsets: ** '/' in North Germanic; ** '/' in East Germanic * vocalization of the first semivowel, its addition to a diphthong, and division of the diphthong and remaining semivowel into two separate segments in West Germanic. The process is brought about by the fact that vowels (or semivowels) in the syllable margin are invariably transformed into consonantal articulations. The conditions of the sound change were long debated, since the ...
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Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branches during the fifth century BC to fifth century AD: West Germanic, East Germanic and North Germanic, which however remained in contact over a considerable time, especially the Ingvaeonic languages (including English), which arose from West Germanic dialects and remained in continued contact with North Germanic. A defining feature of Proto-Germanic is the completion of the process described by Grimm's law, a set of sound changes that occurred between its status as a dialect of Proto-Indo-European and its gradual divergence into a separate language. As it is probable that the development of this sound shift spanned a considerable time (several centuries), Proto-Germanic cannot adequately be reconstructed as a simple node in a tree mode ...
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Gothic Language
Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the ''Codex Argenteus'', a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus. All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other languages such as Portuguese, Spanish, and French. As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European language family. It is the earliest Germanic language that is attested in any sizable texts, but it lacks any modern descendants. The oldest documents in Gothic date back to the fourth century. The language was in decline by the mid-sixth century, partly because of the military defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks, the elimination of the Goths in Italy, and geographic isolation (in Spain, the Gothic language lost its last and probably already declining ...
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Language (journal)
''Language'' is a peer-reviewed quarterly academic journal published by the Linguistic Society of America since 1925. It covers all aspects of linguistics, focusing on the area of theoretical linguistics. Its current editor-in-chief is Andries Coetzee (University of Michigan). Under the editorship of Yale linguist Bernard Bloch, ''Language'' was the vehicle for publication of many of the important articles of American structural linguistics during the second quarter of the 20th century, and was the journal in which many of the most important subsequent developments in linguistics played themselves out. One of the most famous articles to appear in ''Language'' was the scathing 1959 review by the young Noam Chomsky of the book ''Verbal Behavior'' by the behaviorist cognitive psychologist B. F. Skinner. This article argued that Behaviorist psychology, then a dominant paradigm in linguistics (as in psychology at large), had no hope of explaining complex phenomena like language. It ...
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Grimm's Law
Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC. First systematically put forward by Jacob Grimm but previously remarked upon by Rasmus Rask, it establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages. History Grimm's law was the first discovery of a systematic sound change, and it led to the creation of historical phonology as a separate discipline of historical linguistics. The correspondence between Latin ''p'' and Germanic ''f'' was first noted by Friedrich von Schlegel in 1806. In 1818, Rasmus Rask extended the correspondences to other Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit and Greek, and to the full range of consonants involved. In 1822, Jacob Grimm put forth the rule in his book ''Deutsche Grammatik'' and extended it t ...
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Northwest Germanic
Northwest Germanic is a proposed grouping of the Germanic languages, representing the current consensus among Germanic historical linguists. It does not challenge the late 19th-century tri-partite division of the Germanic dialects into North Germanic, West Germanic and East Germanic, but proposes additionally that North and West Germanic (i.e. all surviving Germanic languages today) remained as a subgroup after the southward migration of the East Germanic tribes, only splitting into North and West Germanic later. Whether this subgroup constituted a unified proto-language, or simply represents a group of dialects that remained in contact and close geographical proximity, is a matter of debate, but the formulation of Ringe and Taylor probably enjoys widespread support: There is some evidence that North and West Germanic developed as a single language, Proto-Northwest Germanic, after East Germanic had begun to diverge. However, changes unproblematically datable to the PNWGmc period ...
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Stød
Stød (, also occasionally spelled stod in English) is a suprasegmental unit of Danish phonology (represented in non-standard IPA as ), which in its most common form is a kind of creaky voice (laryngealization), but it may also be realized as a glottal stop, especially in emphatic pronunciation. Some dialects of Southern Danish realize stød in a way that is more similar to the tonal word accents of Norwegian and Swedish. In much of Zealand it is regularly realized as reminiscent of a glottal stop. A probably unrelated glottal stop, with quite different distribution rules, occurs in Western Jutland and is known as the ('West Jutland stød'). The word ''stød'' itself does not have a stød. Phonetics The stød has sometimes been described as a glottal stop, but acoustic analyses have shown that there is rarely a full stop of the airflow involved in its production. Rather it is a form of laryngealization or creaky voice, that affects the phonation of a syllable by dividing ...
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Danish Language
Danish (; , ) is a North Germanic language spoken by about six million people, principally in and around Denmark. Communities of Danish speakers are also found in Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and the northern German region of Southern Schleswig, where it has minority language status. Minor Danish-speaking communities are also found in Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina. Along with the other North Germanic languages, Danish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples who lived in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. Danish, together with Swedish, derives from the ''East Norse'' dialect group, while the Middle Norwegian language (before the influence of Danish) and Norwegian Bokmål are classified as ''West Norse'' along with Faroese and Icelandic. A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish as "mainland (or ''continental'') Scandinavian", wh ...
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Jutlandic Dialect
Jutlandic, or Jutish (Danish: ''jysk''; ), is the western variety of Danish, spoken on the peninsula of Jutland in Denmark. Generally, Jutlandic can be divided into two different dialects: general or Northern Jutlandic ( ; further divided into western and eastern) and Southern Jutlandic ( ). However, the linguistic variation is considerably more complicated and well over 20 separate isoglosses exist throughout Jutland. There are major phonological differences between the dialects, but also very noteworthy morphological, syntactic, and semantic variations. Subdialects The different subdialects of Jutlandic differ somewhat from each other, and are generally grouped in three main dialects, where two of them are sometimes considered together. ''Sønderjysk'' *''Sønderjysk'' (South Jutlandic) is often seen as very difficult for other speakers of Danish, even other Jutlandic dialects to understand. Instead of the normal Danish ''stød'', it has tonal accents like Swedish. Many of t ...
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Faroese Phonology
The phonology of Faroese has an inventory similar to the closely related Icelandic language, but markedly different processes differentiate the two. Similarities include an aspiration contrast in stop consonants, the retention of front rounded vowels and vowel quality changes instead of vowel length distinctions. Vowels * and appear only in loanwords. * The long mid vowels tend to be diphthongized to . * According to the mean formant values of the native vowels (so excluding and ) in , cited in : ** are more open than the corresponding tense vowels, with being the most open of the three () and having the same F1 value as the back . The F2 value of is closer to that of , which means that it is a front vowel. ** and especially are more open than the phonetically close-mid (, often diphthongized to ). Both and are more open than the corresponding short vowels; in addition, is more central than any of the mid front vowels, including , whereas is the most front of the ...
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Gotho-Nordic
Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the ''Codex Argenteus'', a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus. All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other languages such as Portuguese, Spanish, and French. As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European language family. It is the earliest Germanic language that is attested in any sizable texts, but it lacks any modern descendants. The oldest documents in Gothic date back to the fourth century. The language was in decline by the mid-sixth century, partly because of the military defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks, the elimination of the Goths in Italy, and geographic isolation (in Spain, the Gothic language lost its last and probably already declining f ...
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Finnic Languages
The Finnic (''Fennic'') or more precisely Balto-Finnic (Balto-Fennic, Baltic Finnic, Baltic Fennic) languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples. There are around 7 million speakers, who live mainly in Finland and Estonia. Traditionally, eight Finnic languages have been recognized. The major modern representatives of the family are Finnish and Estonian, the official languages of their respective nation states.Finnic Peoples
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The other Finnic languages in the Baltic Sea region are Ingri ...
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Proto-Norse
Proto-Norse (also called Ancient Nordic, Ancient Scandinavian, Ancient Norse, Primitive Norse, Proto-Nordic, Proto-Scandinavian and Proto-North Germanic) was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic in the first centuries CE. It is the earliest stage of a characteristically North Germanic language, and the language attested in the oldest Scandinavian Elder Futhark inscriptions, spoken from around the 2nd to the 8th centuries CE (corresponding to the late Roman Iron Age and the Germanic Iron Age). It evolved into the dialects of Old Norse at the beginning of the Viking Age around 800 CE, which later themselves evolved into the modern North Germanic languages ( Faroese, Icelandic, the three Continental Scandinavian languages, and their dialects). Phonology Proto-Norse phonology probably did not differ substantially from that of Proto-Germanic. Although the phonetic realisation of several phoneme ...
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