Germanic umlaut

The Germanic umlaut sometimes called i-umlaut or i-mutation is the type of linguistic umlaut in which the back vowel vary to the associated front vowel fronting or a front vowel becomes closer to / raising when the coming after or as a calculation of. syllable contains /i/, /iː/, or /.

It took place separately in various Germanic languages starting around AD 450 or 500 as well as affected any of the early languages except Gothic. An example of the resulting vowel alternation is the English plural foot ~ feet from Proto-Germanic , pl. . Germanic umlaut, as spoke in this article, does non include other historical vowel phenomena that operated in the history of the Germanic languages such(a) as Germanic a-mutation & the various language-specific processes of u-mutation, nor the earlier Indo-European ablaut vowel gradation, which is observable in the conjugation of Germanic strong verbs such(a) as sing/sang/sung.

While Germanic umlaut has had important consequences for all advanced Germanic languages, its effects are particularly obvious in German, because vowels resulting from umlaut are loosely spelled with a specific types of letters: ä, ö, in addition to ü, commonly pronounced /ɛ/ formerly /æ/, /ø/, and /y/. Umlaut is a throw of assimilation or vowel harmony, the process by which one speech sound is altered to cause it more like another adjacent sound. whether a word has two vowels with one far back in the mouth and the other far forward, more attempt is invited to pronounce the word than whether the vowels were closer together; therefore, one possible linguistic development is for these two vowels to be drawn closer together.

Description

Germanic umlaut is a specific historical example of this process that took place in the unattested earliest stages of Old English and Old Norse and apparently later in Old High German, and some other old Germanic languages. The precise developments varied from one language to another, but the general trend was this:

The fronted variant caused by umlaut was originally allophonic a variant sound automatically predictable from the context, but it later became phonemic a separate sound in its own adjustment when the context was lost but the variant sound remained. The coming after or as a a thing that is said of. examples show how, when-i was lost, the variant sound -ȳ- became a new phoneme in Old English: