Germanic umlaut

In linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, umlaut (from German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 um- "around"/"the other way" + Laut "sound") is a process whereby a vowel

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

 is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel

Semivowel

In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel is a sound, such as English or , that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.-Classification:...

. The term umlaut was originally coined and is used principally in connection with the study of the Germanic languages

Germanic languages

The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

. In Germanic umlaut (also i-umlaut or i-mutation), a back vowel

Back vowel

A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...

 changes to the associated front vowel

Front vowel

A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...

 or a front vowel

Front vowel

A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...

 becomes closer to i 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

Gothic language

Gothic is an extinct 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 sizable Text corpus...

.

Umlaut should be clearly distinguished from other historical vowel phenomena such as the earlier Indo-European ablaut

Indo-European ablaut

In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...

 (vowel gradation), which is observable in the declension of Germanic strong verb

Germanic strong verb

In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is one which marks its past tense by means of ablaut. In English, these are verbs like sing, sang, sung...

s such as sing/sang/sung.

Description

Umlaut is a form of assimilation

Assimilation (linguistics)

Assimilation is a common phonological process by which the sound of the ending of one word blends into the sound of the beginning of the following word. This occurs when the parts of the mouth and vocal cords start to form the beginning sounds of the next word before the last sound has been...

, the process by which one speech sound is altered to make it more like another adjacent sound. If a word has two vowels, one far back in the mouth and the other far forward, this requires a greater effort to pronounce than if the vowels were closer, and therefore one possible linguistic development is for these two vowels to be drawn closer together.

Germanic umlaut is a specific historical example of this in the unattested earliest stages of Old English, Old High German, or one of the other closely related early medieval language forms: When a two-syllable word had /a/, /o/ or /u/ in the first syllable and the front vowel /i/ in the second, the vowel in the first syllable was fronted. So, for example, pre-Old English *mūsi shifted to *mȳsi, which later lost its ending and became mȳs, then by later regular sound shifts became mīs and eventually modern English mice. Umlaut is the first stage of this: ū > ȳ. However, pre-Old English *mūs did not follow with a front vowel, and became modern mouse, explaining the different vowels in the singular and plural.

Morphological effects

Although umlaut was not a grammatical process, umlauted vowels often serve to distinguish grammatical forms (and thus show similarities to ablaut when viewed synchronically). We can see this in the English word man; in ancient Germanic, the plural of this and some other words had the plural suffix -iz, and the same vowel as the singular. As it contained an i, this suffix caused fronting of the vowel, and, when the suffix later disappeared, the mutated vowel remained as the only plural marker: men. In English, such umlaut-plurals are rare. man, woman, tooth, goose, foot, mouse, louse, brother (archaic or specialized plural in brethren), and cow (poetic and dialectal plural in kine). Umlaut is conspicuous when it occurs in one of such a pair of forms, but there are many mutated words without an unmutated parallel form. Germanic actively derived causative weak verbs from ordinary strong verbs

Germanic strong verb

In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is one which marks its past tense by means of ablaut. In English, these are verbs like sing, sang, sung...

 by applying a suffix, which later caused umlaut, to a past tense form. Some of these survived into modern English as doublets of verbs, including fell and set vs. fall (older past *fefall) and sit.

Parallel umlauts in some modern Germanic languages

Germanic	German	English	Dutch	Swedish	Faroese
*fallanan - *fallijanan	fallen - fällen	to fall - to fell	vallen - vellen	falla - fälla	falla - fella
*fōts - *fōtiz	Fuß - Füße	foot - feet	voet - voeten (no umlaut)	fot - fötter	fótur - føtur
*aldaz - *alþizô - *alþistaz	alt - älter - am ältesten	old - elder - eldest	oud - ouder - oudst (no umlaut)	gammal - äldre - äldst (irregular)	gamal - eldri - elstur (irregular)
*fullaz - *fullijanan	voll - füllen	full - to fill	vol - vullen	full - fylla	fullur - fylla
*langaz - *langīn/*langiþō	lang - Länge	long - length	lang - lengte	lång - längd	langur - longd
*lūs - *lūsiz	Laus - Läuse	louse - lice	luis - luizen (no umlaut)	lus - löss	lús - lýs

Development of umlauts in English

	Germanic	Old English	Modern English
Singular	*mūs	mūs	/maʊs/ 'mouse'
Plural	*mūsiz	mȳs > mīs	/maɪs/ 'mice'
Singular	*fōts	fōt	/fʊt/ 'foot'
Plural	*fōtiz	fēt	/fiːt/ 'feet'

(table adapted from Malmkjær 2002)

German orthography

German orthography is generally consistent in its representation of i-umlaut. The umlaut diacritic

Umlaut (diacritic)

The diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....

, consisting of two dots above the vowel, is used for the fronted vowels, making the historical process much more visible in the modern language than is the case in English: a>ä, o>ö, u>ü, au>äu.

Sometimes a word has a vowel affected by i-umlaut, but the vowel is not marked with the umlaut diacritic. Usually the word with an umlauted vowel comes from an original word without umlaut, but the two are not recognized as a pair because the meaning of the umlauted word has changed.

The adjective fertig ("ready", "finished"; originally "ready to go") contains an umlaut mutation, but it is spelled with e rather than ä as its relationship to Fahrt (journey) has for most speakers of the language been lost from sight. Likewise, alt (old) has the comparative älter (older), but the noun from this is spelled Eltern (parents). Aufwand (effort) has the verb aufwenden (to spend, to dedicate) and the adjective aufwendig (requiring effort), though the 1996 spelling reform

German spelling reform of 1996

The German orthography reform of 1996 was an attempt to simplify the spelling of the German language and thus to make it easier to learn, without substantially changing the rules familiar to all living users of the language....

 now permits the alternative spelling aufwändig (but not aufwänden). For denken, see below.

On the other hand, some foreign words have umlaut diacritics that do not mark a vowel produced by the sound change of umlaut. Notable examples are Känguru from English kangaroo, and Büro from French bureau. In these cases the diacritic is a pure phonological marker, with no regard to etymology.

Für (for) is a special case; it is an umlauted form of vor (before), but other historical developments changed the expected ö into ü. In this case, the ü marks a genuine, but irregular umlaut.

False ablaut in verbs

Two interesting examples of umlaut involve vowel distinctions in Germanic verbs. Often these are subsumed under the heading "ablaut" in descriptions of Germanic verbs, giving them the name false ablaut.

The German word Rückumlaut ("reverse umlaut") is the slightly misleading term given to the vowel distinction between present and past tense forms of certain Germanic weak verb

Germanic weak verb

In Germanic languages, including English, weak verbs are by far the largest group of verbs, which are therefore often regarded as the norm, though historically they are not the oldest or most original group.-General description:...

s. Examples in English are think/thought, bring/brought, tell/told, sell/sold. (These verbs have a dental -t or -d as a tense marker, therefore they are weak and the vowel change cannot be conditioned by ablaut.) The presence of umlaut is possibly more obvious in German denken/dachte ("think/thought"), especially if it is remembered that in German the letters <ä> and are usually phonetically equivalent. The Proto-Germanic verb would have been *þankijanan; the /j/ caused umlaut in all the forms that had the suffix; subsequently the /j/ disappeared. The term "reverse umlaut" indicates that if, with traditional grammar, we take the infinitive and present tense as our starting point, there is an illusion of a vowel-shift towards the back of the mouth (so to speak, <ä>→) in the past tense, but of course the historical development was simply umlaut in the present tense forms.

A variety of umlaut occurs in the 2nd- and 3rd-person singular forms of the present tense of some Germanic strong verb

Germanic strong verb

In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is one which marks its past tense by means of ablaut. In English, these are verbs like sing, sang, sung...

s. For example, German fangen ("to catch") has the present tense ich fange, du fängst, er fängt. The verb geben ("give") has the present tense ich gebe, du gibst, er gibt, though the shift e→i would not be a normal result of umlaut in German. There are in fact two distinct phenomena at play here; the first is indeed umlaut as it is best known, but the second is older and occurred already in Proto-Germanic itself. In both cases, a following i triggered a vowel change, but in Proto-Germanic this only affected e. The effect on back vowels did not occur until hundreds of years later, after the Germanic languages had already begun to split up: *fanhanan, *fanhidi with no umlaut of a, but *gebanan, *gibidi with umlaut of e.

I-mutation in Old English

I-mutation is particularly visible in the inflectional and derivational morphology of Old English

Old English morphology

The grammar of Old English is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more highly inflected, similar to Latin...

, 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 (original suffix -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", frīend "friends".
• The second
  Grammatical person
  Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
  
   and third-person present
  Present tense
  The present tense is a grammatical tense that locates a situation or event in present time. This linguistic definition refers to a concept that indicates a feature of the meaning of a verb...
  
   singular
  Grammatical number
  In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
  
   indicative of strong verb
  Strong verb
  *for the strong inflection in various languages, see strong inflection*for irregular verbs, see irregular verb*for the strong verbs in Germanic languages, see Germanic strong verb...
  
  s (original suffixes -ist, -iþ), as compared to the infinitive
  Infinitive
  In grammar, infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages. In the usual description of English, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives...
  
   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
  Comparative
  In grammar, the comparative is the form of an adjective or adverb which denotes the degree or grade by which a person, thing, or other entity has a property or quality greater or less in extent than that of another, and is used in this context with a subordinating conjunction, such as than,...
  
   form of some adjective
  Adjective
  In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
  
  s (original suffixes -ira < -izōN, -ist < -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" < *fōdjan; lār "lore", lǣran "to teach"; fiellan "to fell", feallan "to fall".
• In the abstract nouns in þ(u) (original suffix -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 (original suffix -injō) – e.g., god "god", gydenn "goddess" (cf. German Gott, Göttin); fox "fox", fyxenn "vixen".
• In i-stem abstract nouns derived from verbs (original suffix -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 affects vowels as follows:

i-mutation
Original	Mutated	Examples
æ	e	þæc "covering" (cf. "thatch"), þeccan "to cover"
e	i	helpan "to help", hilpþ "(he/she) helps"
a+m/n	e+m/n	mann "man", menn "men"
a	æ, e	bacan "to bake", bæcþ "(he/she) bakes"; talu "tale", tellan "to tell"
ā	ǣ	lār "teaching" (cf. "lore"), lǣran "to teach"
o	e	dohtor "daughter", dehter "daughters"
ō	ē	fōt "foot", fēt "feet"
u, o	y	murnan "to mourn", myrnþ "(he/she) mourns"; gold "gold", gyldan "to gild"
ū	ȳ	mūs "mouse", mȳs "mice"
ea	ie	eald "old", ieldra "older" (cf. "elder")
ēa	īe	nēah "near" (cf. "nigh"), nīehst "nearest" (cf. "next")
eo	ie	beornan "to burn", biernþ "(he/she) burns"
ēo	īe	sēoþan "to boil" (cf. "seethe"), sīeþþ "(he/she) boils"

Note:

1. The phonologically expected umlaut of /a/ is /æ/. However, in many cases /e/ appears. Most /a/ in Old English in fact stem from earlier /æ/ due to a change called a-restoration. This change was blocked when /i/ or /j/ followed, leaving /æ/, which subsequently mutated to /e/. For example, in the case of talu "tale" vs. tellan "to tell", the forms at one point in the early history of Old English were tælu and tælljan, respectively. A-restoration converted tælu to talu, but left tælljan alone, and it subsequently evolved to tellan by i-mutation. The same process "should" have led to *becþ instead of bæcþ. That is, the early forms were bæcan and bæciþ. A-restoration converted bæcan to bacan, but left alone bæciþ, which would normally have evolved by umlaut to *becþ. In this case, however, once a-restoration took effect, bæciþ was modified to baciþ by analogy with bacan, and then later umlauted to bæcþ.
2. A similar process resulted in the umlaut of /o/ sometimes appearing as /e/ and sometimes (usually, in fact) as /y/. In Old English, /o/ generally stems from a-mutation
   A-mutation
   A-mutation is a metaphonic process supposed to have taken place in late Proto-Germanic .-General description:In a-mutation, a short high vowel was lowered when the following syllable contained a non-high vowel . Thus, since the change was produced by other vowels besides */a/, the term a-mutation...
   
    of original /u/. A-mutation of /u/ was blocked by a following /i/ or /j/, which later triggered umlaut of the /u/ to /y/. This is why alternations between /o/ and /y/ are common. Umlaut of /o/ to /e/ occurs only when an original /u/ was modified to /o/ by analogy before umlaut took place. For example, dohtor comes from late Proto-Germanic *dohter, from earlier *duhter. The plural in Proto-Germanic was *duhtriz, with /u/ unaffected by a-mutation due to the following /i/. At some point prior to i-mutation, the form *duhtriz was modified to *dohtriz by analogy with the singular form, which then allowed it to be umlauted to a form that resulted in dehter.

A few hundred years after i-umlaut began, another similar change called double umlaut occurred. It was triggered by an /i/ or /j/ in the third or fourth syllable of a word and mutated all previous vowels—but it only worked when the vowel directly preceding the /i/ or /j/ was /u/. This /u/ typically appears as e in Old English or is deleted. Examples are:

• hægtess "witch" < *hagatusjō (cf. Old High German
  Old High German
  The term Old High German refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of...
  
   hagazussa)
• ǣmerge "embers" < *āmurjōn < *aimurjōn (cf. Old High German eimurja)
• ǣrende "errand" < *ǣrundjaz (cf. Old Saxon
  Old Saxon
  Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, is the earliest recorded form of Low German, documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken on the north-west coast of Germany and in the Netherlands by Saxon peoples...
  
   ārundi)
• efstan "to hasten" < archaic œfestan < *ofustan
• ȳmest "upmost" < *uxumistaz (cf. Gothic
  Gothic language
  Gothic is an extinct 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 sizable Text corpus...
  
   áuhumists)

As shown by the examples, affected words typically had /u/ in the second syllable, and mostly /a/ in the first syllable. Note also that the /æ/ developed too late to break to ea or to trigger palatalization of a preceding velar.

I-mutation in High German

I-mutation is visible in Old High German

Old High German

The term Old High German refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of...

 (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).

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

Umlaut (diacritic)

The diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....

 was developed, making the phenomenon very visible. The result in German is that the vowels written as , , and become <ä>, <ö>, and <ü>, and the diphthong becomes <äu>: Mann/Männer ("man/men"), lang/länger ("long/longer"), Fuß/Füße ("foot/feet"), Maus/Mäuse ("mouse/mice"), Haus/Häuser ("house/houses"). On the phonetic realisation of these, see German phonology

German phonology

This article is about the phonology of the German language based on standard German. It deals with current phonology and phonetics as well as with historical developments thereof, including geographical variants .Since German is a pluricentric language, there are a number of different...

.

I-mutation in Old Saxon

In Old Saxon

Old Saxon

Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, is the earliest recorded form of Low German, documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken on the north-west coast of Germany and in the Netherlands by Saxon peoples...

, 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

Old Dutch

In linguistics, Old Dutch denotes the forms of West Franconian spoken and written in the Netherlands and present-day northern Belgium during the Early Middle Ages. It is regarded as the primary stage in the development of a separate Dutch language...

 is similar to the situation found in Old Saxon and Old High German. Later developments in Middle Dutch show, however, that long vowels and diphthongs were not affected by umlaut in the more western dialects, including those in Brabant

Brabantian

Brabantian or Brabantish, also Brabantic , is a dialect group of the Dutch language. It is named after the historical Duchy of Brabant which corresponded mainly to the Dutch province of North Brabant, the Belgian provinces of Antwerp and Flemish Brabant, as well as the institutional Region of...

 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 *fōlijanaN), Dutch retains a back vowel in the stem in voelen /ˈvulə(n)/.

Late Old Dutch saw a merger of /u/ and /o/, causing their umlauted results to merge as well. This means that only two of the original Germanic vowels were affected by umlaut at all in Dutch: /a/, which became /e/, and /u/, which became /y/ (spelled u). The lengthening in open syllables in late Old Dutch also affected /y/, which was lengthened and lowered to /øː/ (spelled eu). This is parallel to the lowering of /i/ in open syllables to /eː/, as in schip ("ship") - schepen ("ships").

I-mutation in Old Norse

The situation in Old Norse is complicated as there are two forms of i-mutation. Of these two, only one is phonologized. I-mutation in Old Norse is phonological if:

• In Proto-Norse, the syllable was heavy
  Syllable weight
  In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime. In classical poetry, both Greek and Latin, distinctions of syllable weight were fundamental to the meter of the line....
  
   and followed by vocalic i (*gastiʀ > gestr, but *staði > *stað) or, regardless of syllable weight if followed by consonantal i (*skunja > skyn). The rule is not perfect, as some light syllables were still umlauted: *kuni > kyn, *komiʀ > kømr.
• In Old Norse, the following syllable contains a remaining Proto-Norse i. For example the root of the dat. sing. of u-stems are i-mutated as the desinence contains a Proto-Norse i, but the dat. sing. of a-stems is not, as their desinence stems from P-N ē.

I-mutation is not phonological if the vowel of a long syllable is i-mutated by a syncopated i. I-mutation does not occur in short syllables.

i-mutation
Original	Mutated	Example
a	e (ę)	fagr (fair) / fegrstr (fairest)
au	ey	lauss (loose) / leysa (to loosen)
á	æ	Áss / Ǽsir Æsir In Old Norse, áss is the term denoting a member of the principal pantheon in Norse paganism. This pantheon includes Odin, Frigg, Thor, Baldr and Tyr. The second pantheon comprises the Vanir...
jú	ý	ljúga (to lie) / lýgr (lies)
o	ø	koma (to come) / kømr (comes)
ó	œ	róa (to row) / rœr (rows)
u	y	upp (up) / yppa (to lift up)
ú	ý	fúll (foul) / fýla (stink, foulness)
ǫ	ø (ø̨)	sǫkk (sank) / søkkva (to sink)

U-mutation in Faroese and Icelandic

Another type of mutation occurred in Faroese and Icelandic, where a changed to ø/o in Faroese and ö in Icelandic when preceded by u. Where Icelandic fronted all of its vowels to ö, Faroese did so as well, except in front of nasal consonants where the result was o. In addition, U-umlaut became so strong in Faroese, that even basic forms of words were changed:

• gata → gøta
• saga → søga

See also

• Germanic a-mutation
• I-mutation
  I-mutation
  I-mutation is an important type of sound change, more precisely a category of regressive metaphony, in which a back vowel is fronted, and/or a front vowel is raised, if the following syllable contains /i/, /ī/ or /j/ I-mutation (also known as umlaut, front mutation, i-umlaut, i/j-mutation or...
  
  
• Indo-European ablaut
  Indo-European ablaut
  In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
  
  
• Umlaut (disambiguation)
• Umlaut (diacritic)
  Umlaut (diacritic)
  The diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....