Germanic umlaut

[2] An example of the resulting vowel alternation is the English plural foot ~ feet (from Proto-Germanic *fōts, pl.

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.

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.

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).

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⟩.

This effect also can be found in a few fossilized diminutive forms, such as kitten from cat, kernel from corn, and the feminine vixen from fox.

Some of these survived into modern English as doublets of verbs, including fell and set versus fall and sit.

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.

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").

In German, some verbs that display a back vowel in the past tense undergo umlaut in the subjunctive mood: singen/sang (ind.)

Compare Old English ġiest "guest", which shows umlaut, and Old High German gast, which does not, both from Proto-Germanic *gastiz.

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.

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: A few hundred years after i-umlaut began, another similar change called double umlaut occurred.

Some (for example, Herbert Penzl)[20] have suggested that the vowels must have been modified without being indicated for lack of proper symbols and/or because the difference was still partly allophonic.

The whole question should now be reconsidered in the light of Fausto Cercignani's suggestion that the Old High German umlaut phenomena produced phonemic changes before the factors that triggered them off changed or disappeared, because the umlaut allophones gradually shifted to such a degree that they became distinctive in the phonological system of the language and contrastive at a lexical level.

Because of the grammatical importance of such pairs, the German umlaut diacritic was developed, making the phenomenon very visible.

In various dialects, the umlaut became even more important as a morphological marker of the plural after the apocope of final schwa (-e); that rounded front vowels have become unrounded in many dialects does not prevent them from serving as markers of the plural given that they remain distinct from their non-umlauted counterparts (just like in English foot – feet, mouse – mice).

It must have had a greater effect than the orthography shows since all later dialects have a regular umlaut of both long and short vowels.

[26] One of the defining phonological features of Dutch, is the general absence of the I-mutation or secondary umlaut when dealing with long vowels.

Unlike English and German, Dutch does not palatalize the long vowels, which are notably absent from the language.

[27] Thus, for example, where modern German has fühlen /ˈfyːlən/ and English has feel /fiːl/ (from Proto-Germanic *fōlijaną), standard Dutch retains a back vowel in the stem in voelen /ˈvulə(n)/.

However in what is traditionally called the Cologne Expansion (the spread of certain West German features in the south-easternmost Dutch dialects during the High Medieval period) the more eastern and southeastern dialects of Dutch, including easternmost Brabantian and all of Limburgish have umlaut of long vowels (or in case of Limburgish, all rounded back vowels), however.

[28] Consequently, these dialects also make grammatical use of umlaut to form plurals and diminutives, much as most other modern Germanic languages do.