The Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law

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Introduction

When I started to study linguistics some decades ago, we learnt some expressions which now seem quaintly archaic. For example, early philologists, as we already did not call them, used to talk about laws of phonology, as though it were compulsory to comply with them, and we learnt about things like Grimm's law and Verner's law. These days I tend to talk about patterns, because these certainly exist, but the word law does not seem quite right. So it was something of a blast from the past when I came across the esoteric expression Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law and I thought I would find out what it was.

The Ingvaeonic languages

These were a group of West Germanic languages which, in early historical times, were spoken close to the North Sea coast from the Jutland peninsular to what is now Holland. They gave rise to English, Scots, Frisian and Low Saxon. They differed somewhat from the neighbouring West Germanic languages, but formed a dialect continuum with them. To the south of them were the Istvaeonic languages, whose descendants include Dutch and Lëtzebuergesch, the language of Luxembourg. Standard German arose from the Irminonic languages, spoken further east.

The "law"

In the Ingvaeonic languages the sequence vowel + nasal consonant + fricative consonant loses the nasal consonant. By the way, the word spirant was formerly used for what we now call a fricative. This pattern is seen in the forms of the personal pronoun us and of the noun goose:

Dutch has been influenced by West Frisian and sometimes follows the Ingvaeonic pattern:

So the situation is not cut and dried, and also the phenomenon occurs well outside the Ingvaeonic area, in Lëtzebuergesch:

Notes
1. A borrowing from Low German, sacht, is also used.
2. Archaic - now replaced by Gäns.

Posted August 2017