Germanic Umlaut. West Germanic languages

Germanic umlaut (also i-umlaut or i-mutation) is a type of linguistic umlaut in which a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel (fronting) or a front vowel becomes closer to /i/ (raising) when the following syllable contains /i/, /iː/, or /j/. This process took place separately in the various Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 AD, and affected all of the early languages except for Gothic. An example of the resulting vowel change is the English plural foot > feet.

Germanic umlaut should be clearly distinguished from other historical vowel phenomena that operated in the history of the Germanic languages such as Germanic a-mutation and the various language-specific processes of u-mutation, as well as the earlier Indo-European ablaut (vowel gradation), which is observable in the declension of Germanic strong verbs such as sing/sang/sung.

Although umlaut operated the same way in all the West Germanic languages, the exact words in which it took place and the outcomes of the process differ between the languages. Of particular note is the loss of word-final –I after heavy syllables. In the more southern languages (Old High German, Old Dutch, Old Saxon), forms that lost –i often show no umlaut, whereas in the more northern languages (Old English, Old Frisian) they do. Compare Old English ġiest "guest", which shows umlaut, and Old High German gast, which does not, both from Proto-Germanic gastiz. This may mean that there was dialectal variation in the timing and spread of the two changes, with final loss happening before umlaut in the south but after it in the north. On the other hand, umlaut may have still been partly allophonic, and the loss of the conditioning sound may have triggered an "un-umlauting" of the preceding vowel. Nevertheless, medial -ij- consistently triggers umlaut, although its subsequent loss is universal in West Germanic except for Old Saxon and early Old High German.

I-mutation in Old English

I-mutation is particularly visible in the inflectional and derivational morphology of Old English, since it affected so many of the Old English vowels. Of 16 basic vowels and diphthongs in Old English, only the four vowels ǣ, ē, i, ī were unaffected by i-mutation. Although i-mutation was originally triggered by an /i/ or /j/ in the syllable following the affected vowel, by Old English times the /i/ or /j/ had generally dropped out or been modified (usually to /e/), with the result that i-mutation generally appears as a morphological process that affects a certain (seemingly arbitrary) set of forms. The most common forms affected are:

· The plural, and genitive/dative singular, forms of consonant-declension nouns (Proto-Germanic (PGmc) -iz), as compared to the nominative/accusative singular – e.g., fōt "foot", fēt "feet"; mūs "mouse", mȳs "mice". Note that many more words were affected by this change in Old English vs. modern English – e.g., bōc "book", bēc "books"; frēond "friend", friend "friends".

· The second and third-person present singular indicative of strong verbs (Pre-Old-English (Pre-OE) *-ist, *-iþ), as compared to the infinitive and other present-tense forms – e.g. helpan "to help", helpe "(I) help", hilpst "(you sg.) help" (cf. archaic "thou helpest"), hilpþ "(he/she) helps" (cf. archaic "he helpeth"), helpaþ "(we/you pl./they) help".

· The comparative form of some adjectives (Pre-OE *-ira < PGmc *-izǭ, Pre-OE *-ist< PGmc *-istaz), as compared to the base form – e.g. eald "old", ieldra "older", ieldest "oldest" (cf. "elder, eldest").

· Throughout the first class of weak verbs (original suffix -jan), as compared to the forms from which the verbs were derived – e.g. fōda "food", fēdan "to feed" < Pre-OE *fōdjan; lār "lore", lǣran "to teach"; feallan "to fall", fiellan "to fell".

· In the abstract nouns in þ(u) (PGmc *-iþō) corresponding to certain adjectives – e.g., strang "strong", strengþ(u) "strength"; hāl "whole/hale", hǣlþ(u) "health"; fūl"foul", fȳlþ(u) "filth".

· In female forms of several nouns with the suffix -enn (PGmc *-injō) – e.g., god "god", gydenn "goddess" (cf. German Gott, Göttin); fox "fox", fyxenn "vixen".

· In i-stem abstract nouns derived from verbs (PGmc *-iz) – e.g. cyme "a coming", cuman "to come"; byre "a son (orig., a being born)", beran "to bear"; fiell "a falling", feallan "to fall"; bend "a bond", bindan "to bind". Note that in some cases the abstract noun has a different vowel than the corresponding verb, due to Proto-Indo-European ablaut.

I-mutation in High German

I-mutation is visible in Old High German (OHG), c. 800 AD, only on /a/, which was mutated to /e/. By this point, it had already become partly phonologized, since some of the conditioning /i/'s and /j/'s had been deleted or modified. The later history of German, however, shows that /o/ and /u/ were also affected — starting in Middle High German, the remaining conditioning environments disappear and /o/ and /u/ appear as /ø/ and /y/ in the appropriate environments.

This has led to a controversy over when and how i-mutation appeared on these vowels. Some (for example, Herbert Penzl) have suggested that the vowels must have been modified already in OHG, but was not indicated due to the lack of proper symbols, and/or because they were still partly allophonic. Others (e.g. Joseph Voyles) have suggested that the i-mutation of /o/ and /u/ was entirely analogical, and pointed to the lack of i-mutation of these vowels in certain places where it would be expected, in contrast to the consistent mutation of /a/. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between — i-mutation of /o/ and /u/ was indeed phonetic, occurring late in OHG, but later spread analogically to the environments where the conditioning had already disappeared by OHG (this is where failure of i-mutation is most likely). It must also be kept in mind that it is an issue of relative chronology: already early in the history of attested OHG, some umlauting factors are known to have disappeared (such as word-internal j after geminates and clusters), and depending on the age of OHG umlaut, this could explain some cases where expected umlaut is missing.

In modern German, umlaut as a marker of the plural of nouns is a regular feature of the language, and although umlaut itself is no longer a productive force in German, new plurals of this type can be created by analogy. Likewise, umlaut marks the comparative of many adjectives, and other kinds of derived forms. Because of the grammatical importance of such pairs, the German umlaut diacritic was developed, making the phenomenon very visible. The result in German is that the vowels written as <a>, <o>, and <u> become <ä>, <ö>, and <ü>, and the diphthong <au> becomes <äu>: Mann/Männer ("man/men"), lang/länger ("long/longer"), Fuß/Füße ("foot/feet"), Maus/Mäuse ("mouse/mice"), Haus/Häuser ("house/houses").

I-mutation in Old Saxon

In Old Saxon, umlaut is much less apparent than in Old Norse. The only vowel that is regularly fronted before an /i/ or /j/ is short /a/. E.g. gast – gesti, slahan –slehis. NB I-umlaut must have had a greater effect than the orthography of OS shows. This is because all the later dialects have regular umlaut of both long and short vowels.

I-mutation in Dutch

The situation in Old Dutch is similar to the situation found in Old Saxon and Old High German. Late Old Dutch saw a merger of /u/ and /o/, causing their umlauted results to merge as well, giving /ʏ/. The lengthening in open syllables in early Middle Dutch then lengthened and lowered this short /ʏ/ to long /øː/ (spelled eu) in some words. This is parallel to the lowering of /i/ in open syllables to /eː/, as in schip ("ship") – schepen ("ships").

Later developments in Middle Dutch show that long vowels and diphthongs were not affected by umlaut in the more western dialects, including those in western Brabant and Holland that were most influential for standard Dutch. Thus for example where modern German has fühlen /ˈfyːlən/ and English has feel /fiːl/ (from Proto-Germanic *fōlijaną), standard Dutch retains a back vowel in the stem in voelen /ˈvulə(n)/. This means that only two of the original Germanic vowels were affected by umlaut at all in western/standard Dutch: /a/, which became /ɛ/, and /u/, which became /ʏ/ (spelled u). As a result of this relatively sparse occurrence of umlaut, standard Dutch does not use umlaut as a grammatical marker. An exception is the noun stad "city" which has the irregular umlauted plural steden.

The more eastern dialects of Dutch, including eastern Brabantian and all of Limburgish do have umlaut of long vowels, however. Consequently, these dialects also make grammatical use of umlaut to form plurals and diminutives, much as most other modern Germanic languages do. Compare vulen /vylə(n)/ and menneke "little man" from man.