Germanic umlaut

In linguistics, umlaut (from German um- "around"/"the other way" + Laut "sound") is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a vowel or semivowel in a following syllable. The term umlaut was originally coined and is principally used in connection with the study of the Germanic languages. In umlaut, a back vowel is modified to the associated front vowel when the following syllable contains [i], [iː] or [j] (the sound of English y). 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.

Umlaut should be clearly distinguished from other historical vowel phenomena such as the earlier Indo-European ablaut (vowel gradation), which is observable in the declension of Germanic strong verbs such as sing/sang/sung.

Description

Umlaut is a form of assimilation, 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 /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. Umlaut explains why the diphthong in mice is at the front of the mouth whereas the diphthong in mouse is located further back.

I-mutation in Old English

I-mutation is particularly visible in the inflectional and derivational morphology of Old English. It is visible, for example, in the singular vs. plural forms of the consonant declension of nouns, listed above (for example, fōt "foot", fēt "feet"; mūs "mouse", mȳs "mice"). It affects the second and third person present singular of strong verbs, as compared to the infinitive (for example, helpe "help", hilpst, hilpþ), and to the comparative form of some adjectives, as compared to the base form (for example, eald "old", ieldra "elder", ieldest "eldest"). It also occurs throughout the first class of weak verbs, and is often visible in comparison to the word such verbs are derived from the -jan verbs: for example, fōda "food", fēdan<*fōdjan "to feed"; lār "lore", lǣran "to teach". In addition, it occurs in the nouns corresponding to certain adjectives (strang "strong", strengþ(u) "strength"; hāl "whole/hale", hǣlþ(u) "health"; fūl "foul", fȳlþ(u) "filth") as well as in female forms of several nouns with the suffix -enn (for example, god - gydann cf. German "Gott"-"Göttin"; fox "fox" - fyxenn "vixen").

I-mutation affects vowels as follows:

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 and followed by vocalic i (*gastiR > gestr, but *staði > *stað) or, regardless of syllable weight if followed by consontal i (*skunja > skyn). The rule is not perfect, as some light syllables were still umlauted: *kuni > kyn, *komiR > 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 in Old 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 -- when and how did i-mutation appear on these vowels? Some 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 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).

I-mutation in Old Saxon and Old Low Franconian

Like ON, OS shows umlaut. In OS the process is much less apparent though, compared to ON. 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.

In English, Dutch, German and Swedish

Although historically umlaut itself has nothing to do with grammatical function, the resulting vowel changes often took on such a function (and thus shows similarities to ablaut when viewed synchronically). We can see this in the English word man; in ancient Germanic, the plural had the same vowel, but also a plural suffix -iz. The 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, with only nine in the language: man, woman, tooth, goose, foot, mouse, louse, brother (archaic or specialized plural in brethren), and cow (poetic and dialectal plural in kine); compare also long (adj)/length (n). Umlaut is conspicuous when it occurs in one of such a pair of forms, but it should be remembered that many English words contain a vowel which has been mutated in this way, but which does not now have a parallel unmutated form; umlaut need not carry a grammatical function.

Parallel umlauts in some modern Germanic languages

Development of umlauts in English

(table adapted from Malmkjær 2002)

In German spelling

Ä, Ö, Ü on A computer keyboard

New and old notation of umlauted vowels

In 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 <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"). On the phonetic realisation of these, see German phonology.

However, German orthography is not entirely consistent in this. 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 adjective aufwendig (requiring effort), though the 1996 spelling reform now permits the alternative spelling aufwändig^[1]. For denken, see below. On the other hand, the umlaut diacritics found in several words are not based on the phenomenon described here, but reconcile the grapheme (spelling) with the phoneme (sound). Notable examples are the <ü> in für ("for"), <ö> in Föhn ("foen wind"), <ä> in Känguru, an English loanword for "kangaroo", and the <ü> in Büro from French bureau.

In Germanic 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, but their origin is distinct.

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 verbs. 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 <e> are usually phonetically equivalent. The Proto-Germanic verb would have been *þankjan; the /j/ caused umlaut in all the forms which 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>→<a>) 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 verbs. For example German fangen ["to catch"] has the present tense ich fange, du fängst, er fängt. Subsequent developments mean that this phenomenon does not always look like umlaut. For example 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. For all practical purposes this can be included in the ablaut tables (as used when teaching German as a second language, for example, or in Old English text books), but its origin is not ablaut.

See also

• Germanic a-mutation
• I-mutation
• Indo-European ablaut
• Umlaut
• Umlaut (diacritic)

Bibliography

• Malmkjær, Kirsten (Ed.). (2002). The linguistics encyclopedia (2nd ed.). London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN 0-415-22209-5.

References