Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law
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In historical linguistics, the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (also called the Anglo-Frisian 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 Frisian, and Old Saxon. By this sound change, in the combination vowel + nasal + fricative, the nasal disappeared, with compensatory lengthening 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:
- Old English ūs
- Old Frisian ūs
- Old Saxon ūs
- Old High German uns
- Middle Dutch ons
- Gothic uns
Gothic represents East Germanic, and its correspondence to German and Dutch shows it has the more original form. The /n/ has disappeared in English, Frisian and Old Saxon, with compensatory lengthening 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).
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 a 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. 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 to recreate the regular ordinal.
- plinth - a Greek loan-word in Modern English (πλίνθος).
