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The vowels of proto-Germanic and their general direction of change when i-mutated in the later Germanic dialects. 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 Germanic umlaut is a specific historical phenomenon of vowel-fronting in German and other Germanic languages, including English. English examples are 'man ~ men' and 'foot ~ feet' (from Proto-Germanic * fōts , pl. * fōtiz ), but English orthography does not indicate this vowel change using the umlaut diacritic.
Typically, English spellings of German loanwords suppress any umlauts (the superscript, double-dot diacritic in Ä, Ö, Ü, ä, ö, and ü) of the original word or replace the umlaut letters with Ae, Oe, Ue, ae, oe, ue, respectively (as is done commonly in German speaking countries when the umlaut is not available; the origin of the umlaut was ...
In linguistics, umlaut (from German "sound alternation") is a sound change in which a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. [1]The term umlaut was originally coined by Jacob Grimm in connection with the study of Germanic languages, as umlaut had occurred prominently in many of their linguistic histories (see Germanic umlaut). [2]
The umlaut is responsible for such modern English forms as men, feet, mice (compare the singulars man, foot, mouse), elder, eldest (compare old), fill (compare full), length (compare long), etc. For details of the changes, see Germanic umlaut, and particularly the section on i-mutation in Old English.
It has also been called "a-umlaut", "a/o-umlaut", "velar umlaut" and, formerly, "Brechung." [2] (This last was Grimm's term, but nowadays German Brechung, and its English equivalents breaking and fracture, are generally restricted in use to other unrelated sound-changes which later affected individual Germanic languages.) [3]
Germanic umlaut (all of the early languages except for Gothic) Great Vowel Shift (English) High German consonant shift; Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (attested in Old English, Old Frisian and Old Saxon) West Germanic gemination
I-mutation (also known as umlaut, front mutation, i-umlaut, i/j-mutation or i/j-umlaut) is a type of sound change in which a back vowel is fronted or a front vowel is raised if the following syllable contains /i/, /iː/ or /j/ (a voiced palatal approximant, sometimes called yod, the sound of English y in yes).