North Sea Germanic Explained
North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic,[2] is a postulated grouping of the northern West Germanic languages that consists of Old Frisian, Old English, and Old Saxon, and their descendants.
Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Germanic cultural group or proto-tribe along the North Sea coast that was mentioned by both Tacitus and Pliny the Elder (the latter also mentioning that tribes in the group included the Cimbri, the Teutoni and the Chauci). It is thought of as not a monolithic proto-language but as a group of closely related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison.
The grouping was first proposed in Nordgermanen und Alemannen (1942) by German linguist and philologist Friedrich Maurer as an alternative to the strict tree diagrams, which had become popular following the work of 19th-century linguist August Schleicher and assumed the existence of a special Anglo-Frisian group. The other groupings are Istvaeonic, from the Istvaeones, which developed into Franconian, and Irminonic, from the Irminones, which developed into Upper German.[3]
Characteristics
Broadly speaking, the changes that characterise the Ingvaeonic languages can be divided into two groups, those being changes that occurred after the split from Proto-Northwest-Germanic (Ingvaeonic B) and those preceding it (Ingvaeonic A). Linguistic evidence for Ingvaeonic B observed in Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon is as follows:
- The so-called Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law: converted *munþ "mouth" into *mų̄þ (compare Old English mūþ).
- Loss of the third-person reflexive pronouns
- The loss of person distinctions in plural forms of verbs, which reduced three forms into one form: merged *habjum "we have" and *habēþ "you (plural) have" with *habją̄þ "they have"
- Palatalisation of velar consonants before front vowels; while the Anglo-Frisian languages further develop these palatal consonants into continuants as in church, Old Saxon did undergo palatalisation as evidenced by forms like kiennan "know" and kiesur "emperor" (contrast German kennen, Kaiser) as well as ieldan "pay", similar to English yield.
- Lack of i-mutation in s/z-stem plurals; compare Anglian OE English, Old (ca.450-1100);: lombur "lambs" with OHG German, Old High (ca.750-1050);: lembir
- The development of Class III weak verbs into a relic class consisting of four verbs (*sagjan "to say", *hugjan "to think", *habjan "to have", *libjan "to live")
- The split of the Class II weak verb endingGermanic languages: *-ōn into Germanic languages: *-ōjan: converted Germanic languages: makōn "to make" into Germanic languages: *makōjan
- Development of a plural ending *-ōs in a-stem nouns.
- Development of numerous new words, such as the replacement of *newun "nine" with *nigun and *minni "less" (adverb) with *laisi
Changes originating in Ingvaeonic A, like Old Norse but unlike Gothic and Old High German, include:
- Dative plurals and first person plural forms in numerous paradigms reduced to -um/-un. Compare an-stem dative plural han-ōm/ōn (OHG) and han-am (Gothic) with hǫn-um (ON), han-um/un (OS) and han-um (OE).
- Elimination of the weak stem -in- in n-stem noun paradigms. For example, OHG gen/dat. sg. han-en and Gothic han-in(s) versus OE han-an, OS han-an/on, OF hon-a, and ON han-a.
- Shortening of pronominal and adjectival non-feminine dative singulars like ON þeim, OE þǣm~þām, OF thām, and OS thēm, all of which have eliminated the final vowel; contrast Gothic þamma as well as OHG dëmu, dëmo, thëmu, thëmo and the like.
Several, but not all, characteristics are also found in Dutch, which did not generally undergo the nasal spirant law (except for a few words), retained the three distinct plural endings (only to merge them in a later, unrelated change), and exhibits the -s plural in only a limited number of words. However, it lost the reflexive pronoun (even though it did later regain it via borrowing) and had the same four relic weak verbs in Class III.
Some varieties of Upper German, like Alemannic and Swabian, also share features with North Sea Germanic languages, namely the merger of plural verb endings (Swabian: mir machet, ihr machet, se/die machet "we/you/they make"). In Bavarian and Polish Yiddish there exists also the conservation of the second person dual pronouns, though only as a replacement of the second person plural (Bavarian/Yiddish: eß/etz, enk plural "you", compare the Sylt Frisian at, junk "you two").
Further reading
- Bremmer, Rolf H. (2009). An Introduction to Old Frisian. Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V. .
- Euler, Wolfram (2013). Das Westgermanische – von der Herausbildung im 3. bis zur Aufgliederung im 7. Jahrhundert – Analyse und Rekonstruktion (West Germanic: from its Emergence in the 3rd up until its Dissolution in the 7th Century CE: Analyses and Reconstruction). 244 p., in German with English summary, London/Berlin 2013, .
- Maurer, Friedrich (1942) Nordgermanen und Alemannen: Studien zur germanischen und frühdeutschen Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde, Strasbourg: Hüneburg.
- Book: Ringe. Donald. Taylor. Ann. The Development of Old English – A Linguistic History of English, vol. II . United States of America. Oxford University Press . 2014.
- Sonderegger, Stefan (1979). Grundzüge deutscher Sprachgeschichte. Diachronie des Sprachsystems. Band I: Einführung – Genealogie – Konstanten. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. .
- Voyles, Joseph B. (1992). Early Germanic Grammar: Pre-, Proto-, and Post-Germanic. San Diego: Academic Press. .
- Book: Harbert, Wayne . The Germanic Languages . Cambridge University Press . 2006 . 978-0-521-80825-5.
- Book: Fulk, R. D. . A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages . Studies in Germanic Linguistics . 2018-09-15 . 3 . John Benjamins . 978-90-272-6313-1 . en . 10.1075/sigl.3. 165765984 .
- Stiles . Patrick V. . 2013-01-01 . The Pan-West Germanic Isoglosses and the Subrelationships of West Germanic to Other Branches . NOWELE: North-Western European Language Evolution . en . 66 . 1 . 5–38 . 10.1075/nowele.66.1.02sti . 0108-8416.
Notes and References
- Anthonia Feitsma, Democratic' and 'elitist' trends and a Frisian standard, in: Andrew R. Linn, Nicola McLelland (eds.), Standardization: Studies from the Germanic Languages, 2002, p. 205 ff., here p. 205
- 2024-03-24.
- Hans Frede Nielsen, Nordic-West Germanic relations, in: The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages, volume 1 (series: Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft or short HSK 22.1), 2002, p. 558ff., here p. 558f.
