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historical linguistics Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical li ...
, the
Ingvaeonic North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic ( ), is a subgrouping of West Germanic languages that consists of Old Frisian, Old English, and Old Saxon, and their descendants. These languages share a number of commonalities, such as a single pl ...
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 North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic ( ), is a subgrouping of West Germanic languages that consists of Old Frisian, Old English, and Old Saxon, and their descendants. These languages share a number of commonalities, such as a single pl ...
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 Germ ...
. This includes
Old English Old English ( or , or ), 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 developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...
,
Old Frisian Old Frisian was a West Germanic language spoken between the late 13th century and the end of 16th century. It is the common ancestor of all the modern Frisian languages except for the North Frisian language#Insular North Frisian, Insular North ...
, 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 Eur ...
, and to a lesser degree
Old Dutch In linguistics, Old Dutch ( Modern Dutch: ') or Old Low Franconian (Modern Dutch: ') is the set of dialects that evolved from Frankish spoken in the Low Countries during the Early Middle Ages, from around the 6th Page 55: "''Uit de zesde eeu ...
(Old Low Franconian).


Overview

The sound change affected sequences of
vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
+ 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 ...
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 in British English) 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 . ...
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 is a developmental stage of Low German. It developed from the Old Saxon language in the Middle Ages and has been documented in writing since about 1225–34 (). During the Hanseatic period (from about 1300 to about 1600), Mid ...
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 has disappeared in English, Frisian, Old Saxon (New Low German has both and ), 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 . This phenomenon is therefore observable throughout the "Ingvaeonic" languages. It does not affect High German, East Germanic or North Germanic. Likewise: * Proto-Germanic > English ''tooth'', North Frisian , (vs. Low German , Dutch, Danish, and Swedish , German , Icelandic ). * Proto-Germanic > English ''other'', Icelandic , West Frisian , West Flemish (Frans-Vlaams) , Old Saxon ''ōðar'', ''āthar'' (vs. Low German d > nn German/Dutch � > d Icelandic: , Swedish , Danish ). * Proto-Germanic > English ''goose'', West Frisian , Low German (vs. Dutch , German ). * Proto-Germanic > English ''five'', West Frisian , East Frisian ''fieuw'', Dutch , Low German (vs. German , Icelandic , Danish and Swedish ). * Proto-Germanic , > English ''soft'', West Frisian , Low German t > xt Dutch t > xt(vs. German ).


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 pe ...
. The original Germanic , which was regularised to 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, a cardinal number, or cardinal for short, is what is commonly called the number of elements of a set. In the case of a finite set, its cardinal number, or cardinality is therefore a natural number. For dealing with the cas ...
''ten'' caused Middle English speakers to recreate the regular ordinal and re-insert the nasal consonant. *''plinth'' – a loanword in
Modern English Modern English, sometimes called New English (NE) or present-day English (PDE) as opposed to Middle and Old English, is the form of the English language that has been spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England England is a Count ...
from
Greek Greek may refer to: 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 of all kno ...
( ). *''amaranth'' – a double loanword from Greek : + : . Likewise, the rare occurrences of the combinations -nf-, -mf- and -ns- have similar explanations. *''answer'' – originally had an intervening stop: Old English , cf. Dutch , German . *''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 vs. German , vs. . Coastal dialects of Dutch tend to have more examples, e.g. standard Dutch vs. Hollandic (earlier ) "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 ( Veldhoven), (
Baarle-Hertog (; , ) 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 the Belgian prov ...
), etc. cognate to standard Dutch .


German

The spirant law was originally active in
Central Franconian Central or Middle Franconian () refers to the following continuum of West Central German dialects: * Ripuarian (spoken in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in eastern Belgium, and the southeastern tip of Dutch Limburg) * Moselle Fr ...
dialects of
High German The High German languages (, i.e. ''High German dialects''), 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 Ben ...
, which is proof that it was not entirely restricted to Ingvaeonic. Compare for example
Luxembourgish Luxembourgish ( ; also ''Luxemburgish'', ''Luxembourgian'', ''Letzebu(e)rgesch''; ) is a West Germanic language that is spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 400,000 people speak Luxembourgish worldwide. The language is standardized and officiall ...
, ''Gaus'' (, 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 Low German is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language variety, language spoken mainly in Northern Germany and the northeastern Netherlands. The dialect of Plautdietsch is also spoken in the Russian Mennonite diaspora worldwide. "Low" ...
borrowings with it. For example (, ousting
Old High German Old High German (OHG; ) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally identified as the period from around 500/750 to 1050. Rather than representing a single supra-regional form of German, Old High German encompasses the numerous ...
), or (, alongside native ). In some High and Highest Alemannic German dialects, there is a similar phenomenon called Staub's law, for example (, Standard German ), (, Standard German ), or (, Standard German ).


References


Sources

* * Markey, Thomas L. ''Germanic dialect grouping and the position of Ingvæonic.''(Inst. f. Sprachwissenschaft d. Univ. Innsbruck, 1976.) * * {{Germanic languages West Germanic languages Old English Germanic sound laws