Description
Umlaut is a form of assimilation, the process by which one speech sound is altered to make it more like another adjacent sound. If a word has two vowels, 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, and therefore one possible linguistic development is for these two vowels to be drawn closer together.
Germanic umlaut is a specific historical example of this process that took place in the unattested earliest stages of Old English, Old High German, and some other old Germanic languages. Whenever a back vowel (/a/, /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. So, for example, pre-Old English *mūsi "mice" shifted to *mȳsi, which eventually developed to modern mice, while the singular form *mūs lacked a following /i/ and was unaffected, eventually becoming modern mouse. The fronted variant caused by umlaut was originally allophonic (i.e. a variant sound automatically predictable due to the context), but later became phonemic (a separate sound in its own right) when the context was lost but the variant sound remained. In this case, when final i was lost, the variant sound -ȳ- became a new phoneme in Old English:
| Process | Language | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Original form | Proto-Germanic | *mūs | *mūsiz | *fōts | *fōtiz |
| Loss of final -z | West Germanic | *mūs | *mūsi | *fōt | *fēti |
| Germanic umlaut | Pre-Old English | *mūs | *mȳsi | *fōt | *fēti |
| Loss of i after a heavy syllable | Old English | mūs | mȳs | fōt | fēt |
| Unrounding of ȳ (> ī) | Early Middle English | mūs | mīs | ||
| Great Vowel Shift | Early Modern and Modern English | /maʊs/ | /maɪs/ | /fʊt/ | /fiːt/ |
(table adapted from Malmkjær 2002) et al.
Read more about this topic: Germanic Umlaut
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