Germanic umlaut

The Germanic umlaut (sometimes 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 /i/ (raising) when the following syllable contains /i/, /iː/, or /j/.

It took place separately in various Germanic languages starting around AD 450 or 500 and affected all of the early languages except Gothic. An example of the resulting vowel alternation is the English plural foot ~ feet (from Proto-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, nor the earlier Indo-European ablaut (vowel gradation), which is observable in the conjugation of Germanic strong verbs such as sing/sang/sung.

While Germanic umlaut has had important consequences for all modern Germanic languages, its effects are particularly apparent in German, because vowels resulting from umlaut are generally spelled with a specific set of letters: ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, and ⟨ü⟩, usually pronounced /ɛ/ (formerly /æ/), /ø/, and /y/. 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.

Description

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 (/ɑ/, /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 *mūsi "mice" shifted to proto-Old English *mȳsi, which eventually developed to modern mice, while the singular form *mūs lacked a following /i/ and was unaffected, eventually becoming modern mouse.
• 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'.

The fronted variant caused by umlaut was originally allophonic (a variant sound automatically predictable from context), but it later became phonemic 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:

Outcomes in modern spelling and pronunciation

The following table surveys how Proto-Germanic vowels which later underwent i-umlaut generally appear in modern languages — though there are many exceptions to these patterns owing to other sound-changes and chance variations. The table gives two West Germanic examples (English and German) and two North Germanic examples (Swedish, from the east, and Icelandic, from the west). Spellings are marked by pointy brackets (⟨...⟩) and pronunciation, given in the international phonetic alphabet, in slashes (/.../).

Whereas modern English does not have any special letters for vowels produced by i-umlaut, in German the letters ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, and ⟨ü⟩ almost always represent umlauted vowels (see further below). Likewise, in Swedish ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, and ⟨y⟩ and Icelandic ⟨æ⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨ý⟩, and ⟨ey⟩ are almost always used of vowels produced by i-umlaut. However, German ⟨eu⟩ represents vowels from multiple sources, which is also the case for ⟨e⟩ in Swedish and Icelandic.

German orthography

German orthography is generally consistent in its representation of i-umlaut. The umlaut diacritic, consisting of two dots above the vowel, is used for the fronted vowels, making the historical process much more visible in the modern language than is the case in English: ⟨a⟩ – ⟨ä⟩, ⟨o⟩ – ⟨ö⟩, ⟨u⟩ – ⟨ü⟩, ⟨au⟩ – ⟨äu⟩. This is a neat solution when pairs of words with and without umlaut mutation are compared, as in umlauted plurals like Mutter – Mütter ("mother" – "mothers").

However, in a small number of words, a vowel affected by i-umlaut is not marked with the umlaut diacritic because its origin is not obvious. Either there is no unumlauted equivalent or they are not recognized as a pair because the meanings have drifted apart. 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 verb aufwenden ("to spend, to dedicate") and the adjective aufwendig ("requiring effort") though the 1996 spelling reform now permits the alternative spelling aufwändig (but not *aufwänden). For denken, see below.

Some words have umlaut diacritics that do not mark a vowel produced by the sound change of umlaut. This includes loanwords such as Känguru from English kangaroo, and Büro from French bureau. Here the diacritic is a purely phonological marker, indicating that the English and French sounds (or at least, the approximation of them used in German) are identical to the native German umlauted sounds. Similarly, Big Mac was originally spelt Big Mäc in German. In borrowings from Latin and Greek, Latin ⟨ae⟩, ⟨oe⟩, or Greek ⟨αι⟩ ai, ⟨οι⟩ oi, are rendered in German as ä and ö respectively (Ägypten, "Egypt", or Ökonomie, "economy"). However, Latin ⟨y⟩ and Greek ⟨υ⟩ are written y in German instead of ü (Psychologie). There are also several non-borrowed words where the vowels ö and ü have not arisen through historical umlaut, but due to rounding of an earlier unrounded front vowel (possibly from the labial/labialized consonants w/f/sch occurring on both sides), such as fünf ("five"; from Middle High German vinf), zwölf ("twelve"; from zwelf), and schöpfen ("create"; from schepfen).

Substitution

When German words (names in particular) are written in the basic Latin alphabet, umlauts are usually substituted with ⟨ae⟩, ⟨oe⟩ and ⟨ue⟩ to differentiate them from simple ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩, and ⟨u⟩.

Orthography and design history

The German phonological umlaut is present in the Old High German period and continues to develop in Middle High German. From the Middle High German, it was sometimes denoted in written German by adding an ⟨e⟩ to the affected vowel, either after the vowel or, in the small form, above it. This can still be seen in some names: Goethe, Goebbels, Staedtler.

In blackletter handwriting, as used in German manuscripts of the later Middle Ages and also in many printed texts of the early modern period, the superscript ⟨e⟩ still had a form that would now be recognisable as an ⟨e⟩, but in manuscript writing, umlauted vowels could be indicated by two dots since the late medieval period.

Unusual umlaut designs are sometimes also created for graphic design purposes, such as to fit an umlaut into tightly-spaced lines of text. It may include umlauts placed vertically or inside the body of the letter.

Morphological effects

Although umlaut was not a grammatical process, umlauted vowels often serve to distinguish grammatical forms (and thus show similarities to ablaut when viewed synchronically), as can be seen in the English word man. In ancient Germanic, it and some other words had the plural suffix *-iz, with the same vowel as the singular. As it contained an *i, this 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 plurals are rare: man, woman, tooth, goose, foot, mouse, louse, brother (archaic or specialized plural in brethren), and cow (poetic and dialectal plural in kine). It also can be found in a few fossilized diminutive forms, such as kitten from cat and kernel from corn, and the feminine vixen from fox. Umlaut is conspicuous when it occurs in one of such a pair of forms, but there are many mutated words without an unmutated parallel form. Germanic actively derived causative weak verbs from ordinary strong verbs by applying a suffix, which later caused umlaut, to a past tense form. Some of these survived into modern English as doublets of verbs, including fell and set vs. fall and sit. Umlaut could occur in borrowings as well if stressed vowel was coloured by a subsequent front vowel, such as German Köln, "Cologne", from Latin Colonia, or Käse, "cheese", from Latin caseus.

Parallel umlauts in some modern Germanic languages

Umlaut in Germanic verbs

Some interesting examples of umlaut involve vowel distinctions in Germanic verbs. Although these are often subsumed under the heading "ablaut" in tables of Germanic irregular verbs, they are a separate phenomenon.

Present stem Umlaut in strong verbs

A variety of umlaut occurs in the second and third 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. The verb geben ("give") has the present tense ich gebe, du gibst, er gibt, but the shift e→i would not be a normal result of umlaut in German. There are, in fact, two distinct phenomena at play here; the first is indeed umlaut as it is best known, but the second is older and occurred already in Proto-Germanic itself. In both cases, a following *i triggered a vowel change, but in Proto-Germanic, it affected only *e. The effect on back vowels did not occur until hundreds of years later, after the Germanic languages had already begun to split up: *fą̄haną, *fą̄hidi with no umlaut of *a, but *gebaną, *gibidi with umlaut of *e.

Present stem Umlaut in weak verbs (Rückumlaut)

The German word Rückumlaut ("reverse umlaut"), sometimes known in English as "unmutation", is a term given to the vowel distinction between present and preterite forms of certain Germanic weak verbs. These verbs exhibit the dental suffix used to form the preterite of weak verbs, and also exhibit what appears to be the vowel gradation characteristic of strong verbs. Examples in English are think/thought, bring/brought, tell/told, sell/sold. The phenomenon can also be observed in some German verbs including brennen/brannte ("burn/burnt"), kennen/kannte ("know/knew"), and a handful of others. In some dialects, particularly of western Germany, the phenomenon is preserved in many more forms (for example Luxembourgish stellen/gestallt, "to put", and Limburgish tèlle/talj/getaldj, "to tell, count"). The cause lies with the insertion of the semivowel /j/ between the verb stem and inflectional ending. This /j/ triggers umlaut, as explained above. In short stem verbs, the /j/ is present in both the present and preterite. In long stem verbs however, the /j/ fell out of the preterite. Thus, while short stem verbs exhibit umlaut in all tenses, long stem verbs only do so in the present. When the German philologist Jacob Grimm first attempted to explain the phenomenon, he assumed that the lack of umlaut in the preterite resulted from the reversal of umlaut. In actuality, umlaut never occurred in the first place. Nevertheless, the term "Rückumlaut" makes some sense since the verb exhibits a shift from an umlauted vowel in the basic form (the infinitive) to a plain vowel in the respective inflections.

Umlaut as a subjunctive marker

In German, some verbs which display a back vowel in the past tense undergo umlaut in the subjunctive mood: singen/sang (ind.) → sänge (subj.) ("sing/sang"); fechten/focht (ind.) → föchte (subj.) ("fence/fenced"). Again, this is due to the presence of a following i in the verb endings in the Old High German period.

Historical survey by language

West Germanic languages

Although umlaut operated the same way in all the West Germanic languages, the exact words in which it took place and the outcomes of the process differ between the languages. Of particular note is the loss of word-final *-i after heavy syllables. In the more southern languages (Old High German, Old Dutch, Old Saxon), forms that lost *-i often show no umlaut, but in the more northern languages (Old English, Old Frisian), the forms do. Compare Old English ġiest "guest", which shows umlaut, and Old High German gast, which does not, both from Proto-Germanic *gastiz. That may mean that there was dialectal variation in the timing and spread of the two changes, with final loss happening before umlaut in the south but after it in the north. On the other hand, umlaut may have still been partly allophonic, and the loss of the conditioning sound may have triggered an "un-umlauting" of the preceding vowel. Nevertheless, medial *-ij- consistently triggers umlaut although its subsequent loss is universal in West Germanic except for Old Saxon and early Old High German.

I-mutation in Old English

I-mutation generally affected Old English vowels as follows in each of the main dialects. It led to the introduction into Old English of the new sounds /y(ː)/, /ø(ː)/ (which, in most varieties, soon turned into /e(ː)/), and a sound written in Early West Saxon manuscripts as ⟨ie⟩ but whose phonetic value is debated.

I-mutation is particularly visible in the inflectional and derivational morphology of Old English since it affected so many of the Old English vowels. Of 16 basic vowels and diphthongs in Old English, only the four vowels ǣ, ē, i, ī were unaffected by i-mutation. Although i-mutation was originally triggered by an /i(ː)/ or /j/ in the syllable following the affected vowel, by the time of the surviving Old English texts, the /i(ː)/ or /j/ had generally changed (usually to /e/) or been lost entirely, with the result that i-mutation generally appears as a morphological process that affects a certain (seemingly arbitrary) set of forms. These are most common forms affected:

• The plural, and genitive/dative singular, forms of consonant-declension nouns (Proto-Germanic (PGmc) *-iz), as compared to the nominative/accusative singular – e.g., fōt "foot", fēt "feet"; mūs "mouse", mȳs "mice". Many more words were affected by this change in Old English vs. modern English – e.g., bōc "book", bēċ "books"; frēond "friend", frīend "friends".
• The second and third person present singular indicative of strong verbs (Pre-Old-English (Pre-OE) *-ist, *-iþ), as compared to the infinitive and other present-tense forms – e.g. helpan "to help", helpe "(I) help", hilpst "(you sg.) help", hilpþ "(he/she) helps", helpaþ "(we/you pl./they) help".
• The comparative form of some adjectives (Pre-OE *-ira < PGmc *-izǭ, Pre-OE *-ist < PGmc *-istaz), as compared to the base form – e.g. eald "old", ieldra "older", ieldest "oldest" (cf. "elder, eldest").
• Throughout the first class of weak verbs (original suffix -jan), as compared to the forms from which the verbs were derived – e.g. fōda "food", fēdan "to feed" < Pre-OE *fōdjan; lār "lore", lǣran "to teach"; feallan "to fall", fiellan "to fell".
• In the abstract nouns in þ(u) (PGmc *-iþō) corresponding to certain adjectives – e.g., strang "strong", strengþ(u) "strength"; hāl "whole/hale", hǣlþ(u) "health"; fūl "foul", fȳlþ(u) "filth".
• In female forms of several nouns with the suffix -enn (PGmc *-injō) – e.g., god "god", gydenn "goddess" (cf. German Gott, Göttin); fox "fox", fyxenn "vixen".
• In i-stem abstract nouns derived from verbs (PGmc *-iz) – e.g. cyme "a coming", cuman "to come"; byre "a son (orig., a being born)", beran "to bear"; fiell "a falling", feallan "to fall"; bend "a bond", bindan "to bind". Note that in some cases the abstract noun has a different vowel than the corresponding verb, due to Proto-Indo-European ablaut.