|
The Germanic umlaut (more usually called i-umlaut or i-mutation) is a type of linguistic umlaut in which a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel (fronting) or a front vowel becomes closer to (raising) when the following syllable contains , , or . It took place separately in various Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 Ad and affected all of the early languages except Gothic. An example of the resulting vowel alternation is the English plural ''foot ~ feet'' (from Germanic */fōts/, pl. */fōtiz/). Germanic umlaut, as covered in this article, does not include other historical vowel phenomena that operated in the history of the Germanic languages such as Germanic a-mutation and the various language-specific processes of u-mutation, as well 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 or vowel harmony, the process by which one speech sound is altered to make it more like another adjacent sound. If a word has two vowels with one far back in the mouth and the other far forward, more effort is required to pronounce the word than if the vowels were closer together; therefore, one possible linguistic development is for these two vowels to be drawn closer together. Germanic umlaut is a specific historical example of this process that took place in the unattested earliest stages of Old English and Old Norse and apparently later in Old High German, and some other old Germanic languages. The precise developments varied from one language to another, but the general trend was this: * Whenever a back vowel (/a/, /o/ or /u/, whether long or short) occurred in a syllable and the front vowel /i/ or the front glide /j/ occurred in the next, the vowel in the first syllable was fronted (usually to /æ/, /ø/, and /y/ respectively). Thus, for example, West Germanic '' *mūsiz'' "mice" shifted to proto-Old English '' *mȳsiz'', which eventually developed to modern ''mice'', while the singular form '' *mūs'' lacked a following /i/ and was unaffected, eventually becoming modern ''mouse''.〔Campbell, A. 1959. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press. §§624-27.〕 * When a low or mid-front vowel occurred in a syllable and the front vowel /i/ or the front glide /j/ occurred in the next, the vowel in the first syllable was raised. This happened less often in the Germanic languages, partly because of earlier vowel harmony in similar contexts. However, for example, proto-Old English /æ/ became /e/ in, for example, */bæddj-/ > /bedd/ 'bed'.〔Hogg, Richard M., ‘Phonology and Morphology’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 1: The Beginnings to 1066, ed. by Richard M. Hogg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 67–167 (p. 113).〕 The fronted variant caused by umlaut was originally allophonic (a variant sound automatically predictable from the context), but it later became phonemic (a separate sound in its own right) when the context was lost but the variant sound remained. The following examples show how, when final ''-i'' was lost, the variant sound ''-ȳ-'' became a new phoneme in Old English:〔Table adapted from Campbell, Historical Linguistics (2nd edition), 2004, p. 23. See also Malmkjær, The Linguistics Encyclopedia (2nd Edition), 2002, pp. 230-233.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Germanic umlaut」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|