pronounced as /notice/In historical linguistics, the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (also called the Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic nasal spirant law) is a description of a phonological development that occurred in the Ingvaeonic dialects of the West Germanic languages. This includes Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon, and to a lesser degree Old Dutch (Old Low Franconian).
The sound change affected sequences of vowel + nasal consonant + fricative consonant. ("Spirant" is an older term for "fricative".) The sequences in question are -ns-, -mf-, and -nþ-, preceded by any vowel. The nasal consonant disappeared, sometimes causing nasalization and compensatory lengthening of the vowel before it. The nasalization disappeared relatively soon after in many dialects along the coast, but it was retained long enough to prevent Anglo-Frisian brightening of pronounced as //ɑː// to pronounced as //æː//. The resulting long nasalized vowel pronounced as //ɑ̃ː// was rounded to pronounced as //oː// in most languages under various circumstances.
In Old Saxon on the other hand, the nasal consonant is later restored in all but a small handful of forms, so that Old Saxon pronounced as //fĩːf// ('five') appears as pronounced as //fiːf// in all Middle Low German dialects, while Old Saxon pronounced as //mũːθ// ('mouth') appears as pronounced as //mʊnd// in all Middle Low German dialects. The Old Saxon words pronounced as //ɣɑ̃ːs// ('goose') and pronounced as //ũːs// ('us') appear variably with and without a restored consonant, an example being the combination of pronounced as //ɣoːs// and pronounced as //ʊns// on the Baltic coast.
The sequence -nh- had already undergone a similar change in late Proto-Germanic several hundred years earlier, and affected all Germanic languages, not only the Ingvaeonic subgroup (see Germanic spirant law). The result of this earlier change was the same: a long nasal vowel. However, the nasalization in this earlier case did not cause rounding of nasal pronounced as //ɑ̃ː// in Old Saxon, which instead became simple pronounced as //ɑː//, while the later Ingvaeonic spirant law resulted in pronounced as //oː//. In Old English and Old Frisian, rounding occurred here as well, giving pronounced as //oː// in both cases. It was this earlier shift that created the n/∅ in think/thought and bring/brought.
Compare the first person plural pronoun "us" in various old Germanic languages:
Gothic uns Old High German uns (dative) or unsih (accusative) Old Dutch uns | Old English ūs Old Frisian ūs Old Saxon ūs (accusative also unsik) |
Gothic represents East Germanic, and its correspondence to German and Standard Dutch shows it retains the more conservative form. The /n/ has disappeared in English, Frisian, Old Saxon (New Low German has both us and uns), and dialectal Dutch with compensatory lengthening of the /u/. This phenomenon is therefore observable throughout the "Ingvaeonic" languages. It does not affect High German, East Germanic or North Germanic.
Likewise:
English shows the results of the shift consistently throughout its repertoire of native lexemes. One consequence of this is that English has very few words ending in -nth; those that exist must have entered the vocabulary subsequent to the productive period of the nasal spirant law:
Likewise, the rare occurrences of the combinations -nf-, -mf- and -ns- have similar explanations.
Although Dutch is based mostly on the Hollandic dialects, which in turn were influenced by Frisian, it was also heavily influenced by the Brabantian dialect which tends not to show a shift. As a result, the shift is generally not applied but is still applied to some words. For example Dutch Dutch; Flemish: vijf vs. German German: fünf, Dutch; Flemish: zacht vs. German: sanft. Coastal dialects of Dutch tend to have more examples, e.g. standard Dutch Dutch; Flemish: mond "mouth" vs. Hollandic mui (earlier Dutch; Flemish: muide) "slit between sandbanks where tidal streams flow into". Brabantian dialects tend to have fewer examples, having unshifted examples in a few cases where standard Dutch has the shift, as in the toponyms Dutch; Flemish: Zonderwijk (Veldhoven), Dutch; Flemish: Zondereigen (Baarle-Hertog), etc. cognate to standard Dutch Dutch; Flemish: zuid "south".
The spirant law was originally active in Central Franconian dialects of High German, which is proof that it was not entirely restricted to Ingvaeonic. Compare for example Luxembourgish Luxembourgish; Letzeburgesch: eis ("us"), Gaus ("goose", now archaic). Modern Standard German is based more on eastern varieties which are not affected by the shift. The standard language does, however, contain a number of Low German borrowings with it. For example Süden ("south", ousting Old High German German, Old High (ca.750-1050);: sundan), or sacht ("soft, gentle", alongside native sanft).
In some High and Highest Alemannic German dialects, there is a similar phenomenon called Staub's law, for example Swiss German; Alemannic; Alsatian: üüs ("us", Standard German uns), füüf ("five", Standard German fünf), or treiche ("drink", Standard German trinken).