Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law

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Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law

In historical linguistics

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...
, the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (also called the Anglo-Frisian
Anglo-Frisian languages

The Anglo-Frisian languages are a group of Ingvaeonic West Germanic languages consisting of Old English language, Old Frisian, and their descendants....
or North Sea Germanic nasal spirant law) is a description of a phonological development in some dialects of West Germanic, which is attested in Old English

Old English language

Old English is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century....
, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon. By this sound change, in the combination 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....
+ nasal

Nasal consonant

A nasal consonant is produced with a lowered soft palate in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue....
+ fricative, the nasal disappeared, with compensatory lengthening

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....
of the vowel. ("Spirant" is an older term for "fricative".) The sequences in question are original -ns-, -mf-, and -nþ-.

Compare the first person plural pronoun us in various old Germanic languages:

Gothic represents East Germanic, and its correspondence to German and Dutch shows it retains the more conservative form.

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In historical linguistics

Historical linguistics

Old English language

Vowel

Nasal consonant

Compensatory lengthening

Old English
Old English language

Old English is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century....
us
Old Frisian
Old Frisian

Old Frisian was the West Germanic languages spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries by the people who had settled in the area between the Rhine and Elbe on the European North Sea coast in the 4th and 5th centuries....
us
Old Saxon
Old Saxon

Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German , is the earliest recorded form of Low German, documented from the 9th century until the 12th century, when it evolved into Middle Low German....
us
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 Old High German proper to 750 for this reason...
uns
Middle Dutch
Middle Dutch

Middle Dutch is a collective name for a number of closely related West Germanic dialects which were spoken and written between 1150 and 1500. There was at that time as yet no overarching standard language, but they were all mutually intelligible....
ons
Gothic
Gothic language

Gothic is an extinct language Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from Codex Argenteus, a 6th century copy of a 4th century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic languages with a sizable corpus....
uns

Gothic represents East Germanic, and its correspondence to German and Dutch shows it retains the more conservative form. The /n/ has disappeared in English, Frisian and Old Saxon, with compensatory lengthening

Compensatory lengthening

Germanic *tanþ- becomes English tooth, Old Frisian toth (cf. Low German Tähn, Dutch tand, German Zahn).
Germanic *anþara- becomes English other, West Frisian oar, East Frisian uur, Old Saxon athar (cf. German & Dutch ander- [þ?d]).
Germanic *fimf becomes English five, West Frisian fiif, East Frisian fieuw, Dutch vijf, Low German fiev, fief (cf. German fünf).
Germanic *samft- becomes English soft, West Frisian sêft, Low German sacht, Dutch zacht [ft?xt] (cf. German sanft).
Germanic *gans- becomes English goose, West Frisian goes, Low German Goos (cf. Dutch gans, German Gans).

Note that Dutch is inconsistent, following the law in some words but not others; this must be understood in terms of the standard language drawing from a variety of dialects, only some of which were affected by the sound change. Similarly, certain North German dialects retain Old Saxon forms, with the result that very few words in Modern Standard German have this shift: alongside sanft German also has sacht, both meaning "soft", "gentle".

One consequence of this is that English has very few words ending in -nth; those which do exist must be more recent than the productive period of the Anglo-Frisian nasal spirant law:

month - in Old English this was monaþ (cf. German Monat); the intervening vowel made the law inoperable.
tenth - a neologism in Middle English
Middle English

Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman conquest of England of 1066 and about 1470, when the #Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the introduction of the printing press into England by William...
. Germanic *tehunþ- did originally follow the law, producing Old English teoþa (Modern English tithe), but the force of analogy to the cardinal number ten caused Middle English speakers to recreate the regular ordinal.
plinth - a Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
loan-word in Modern English
Modern English

Modern English is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift, completed in roughly 1550.Despite some differences in vocabulary, texts from the early 17th century, such as the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are considered to be in Modern English, or more specifically, are referred to as using...
.