| Sound change and alternation |
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| Fortition |
| Dissimilation |
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] While the common English plural is umlauts, the German plural is Umlaute.
Umlaut is a form of assimilation, the process of one speech sound becoming more similar to a nearby sound. Umlaut occurred in order to make words easier to pronounce. [3] If a word has two vowels, one back in the mouth and the other forward, it takes more effort to pronounce than if those vowels were closer together. Thus, one way languages may change is that these two vowels get drawn closer together. The phenomenon is also known as vowel harmony, the complete or partial identity of vowels within a domain, typically a word.
For example, in Old High German, the word gast 'guest' had the plural form gesti 'guests': the plural ending -i caused the vowel in the stem to be a front vowel e. This vowel alternation remained in the language, so that present-day Standard German displays the forms Gast [gast] – Gäste [gɛstə], although the final front vowel has been reduced to the central schwa vowel. [4]
The most commonly seen types of umlaut are the following:
All of these processes occurred in the history of the Germanic languages; see Germanic umlaut for more details. I-mutation is the most prominent of the processes, to the extent that it is often referred to simply as "umlaut". [5]
Similar processes also occurred in the history of the Celtic languages, especially Old Irish. [3] In this context, these processes are often referred to as affection . [6]
Vowel-raising umlaut occurred in the history of many of the Romance languages, in which it is normally termed Metaphony . [7]
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia, Iron Age Northern Germany and along the North Sea and Baltic coasts.
The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family.
The Germanic umlaut 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.
In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features. Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning that the affected vowels do not need to be immediately adjacent, and there can be intervening segments between the affected vowels. Generally one vowel will trigger a shift in other vowels, either progressively or regressively, within the domain, such that the affected vowels match the relevant feature of the trigger vowel. Common phonological features that define the natural classes of vowels involved in vowel harmony include vowel backness, vowel height, nasalization, roundedness, and advanced and retracted tongue root.
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut is a system of apophony in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).
In the Germanic languages, weak verbs are by far the largest group of verbs, and are therefore often regarded as the norm. They are distinguished from the Germanic strong verbs by the fact that their past tense form is marked by an inflection containing a, , or sound rather than by changing the verb's root vowel.
Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
Assimilation is a sound change in which some phonemes change to become more similar to other nearby sounds. A common type of phonological process across languages, assimilation can occur either within a word or between words.
I-mutation is a type of sound change in which a back vowel is fronted or a front vowel is raised if the following syllable contains, or. It is a category of regressive metaphony, or vowel harmony.
A-mutation is a metaphonic process supposed to have taken place in late Proto-Germanic.
In historical linguistics, metaphony is a class of sound change in which one vowel in a word is influenced by another in a process of assimilation. The sound change is normally "long-distance" in that the vowel triggering the change may be separated from the affected vowel by several consonants, or sometimes even by several syllables.
In historical linguistics, vowel breaking, vowel fracture, or diphthongization is the sound change of a monophthong into a diphthong or triphthong.
In linguistics, apophony is an alternation of vowel (quality) within a word that indicates grammatical information.
Umlaut may refer to:
In historical linguistics, transphonologization is a type of sound change whereby a phonemic contrast that used to involve a certain feature X evolves in such a way that the contrast is preserved, yet becomes associated with a different feature Y.
Affection, in the linguistics of the Celtic languages, is the change in the quality of a vowel under the influence of the vowel of the following final syllable.
Old Norse has three categories of verbs and two categories of nouns. Conjugation and declension are carried out by a mix of inflection and two nonconcatenative morphological processes: umlaut, a backness-based alteration to the root vowel; and ablaut, a replacement of the root vowel, in verbs.
Umlaut is a name for the two dots diacritical mark as used to indicate in writing the result of the historical sound shift due to which former back vowels are now pronounced as front vowels.
In the Romance languages, metaphony was an early vowel mutation process that operated in all Romance languages to varying degrees, raising certain stressed vowels in words with a final or or a directly following. This is conceptually similar to the umlaut process characteristic of the Germanic languages. Metaphony is most extensive in the Italo-Romance languages, and applies to nearly all languages of Italy. However, it is absent from Tuscan, and hence from Standard Italian.
In phonology, fronting is a sound change in which a vowel or consonant becomes fronted, advanced or pronounced farther to the front of the vocal tract than some reference point. The opposite situation, in which a sound becomes pronounced farther to the back of the vocal tract, is called backing or retraction. Fronting may be triggered by a nearby sound, in which case it is a form of assimilation, or may occur on its own.
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