In
historical linguisticsHistorical 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-FrisianThe Anglo-Frisian languages are a group of Ingvaeonic West Germanic languages consisting of Old English, 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 EnglishOld English , also called Anglo-Saxon, 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 at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary...
, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon. By this sound change, in the combination
vowelIn 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...
+
nasalA nasal consonant is produced with a lowered velum 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 lips or tongue...
+ fricative, the nasal disappeared, with
compensatory lengtheningCompensatory 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-.
Examples
Compare the first person plural pronoun
us in various old Germanic languages:
- Old English
Old English , also called Anglo-Saxon, 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 at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary...
ūs
- Old Frisian
Old Frisian is a West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries in the area between the Rhine and Elbe on the European North Sea coast. Whether the speakers of Frisian are the immediate descendants of the Frisians of Roman times or immigrants from North Germany and Denmark is...
ūs
- 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 Denmark by Saxon peoples...
ūs
- Middle Flemish uus
- 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...
uns
- 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...
ons
- Gothic
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 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 lengtheningCompensatory 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 /u/.
Likewise:
- Germanic *tanþ- becomes English tooth, Old Frisian tōth (cf. Low German Tähn, Dutch tand, German Zahn).
- Germanic *anþara- becomes English other, West Frisian oar, East Frisian uur, Old Saxon āthar (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).
Dutch
Note that Dutch is inconsistent, following the law in some words but not others; this must be understood in terms of the standard language based on the idiom of the big towns of southern Holland which lost most but not all of its ingvaeonic characteristics under the influence of the language of Brabant:
Tranlated, the quote reads: "With the exception of
brocht ->
bracht we can't call upon the north-eastern dialects (to justify the disappeance of ingvaeonic characteristics), as they also show quite a lot of ingvaeonic traits. One must think of another region without ingvaeonic characteristics and in the light of the currents of immigration (to Holland's big southern cities) at that time (after the fall of Antwerp in 1585), an influence from Brabant is much more likely."
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".
English
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 is the name given by historical linguists to the diverse forms of the English language in use between the late 11th century 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...
. Germanic *tehunþ- did originally follow the law, producing Old English tēoþa (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 , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical...
loan-word in Modern EnglishModern English is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, 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...
.