Talk:Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents |
[edit] Page move
Doric Loon questioned why i made this change. the reasons are
- The term "Anglo-Frisian nasal spirant law" is simply wrong, since it applies to all the Ingvaeonic languages, not just Anglo-Saxon and Frisian.
- The only Google references to "Anglo-Frisian nasal spirant law" are on Wikipedia or sources derived from it, so it is not a generally used term.
Doric Loon also questions the term "Ingvaeonic"; but this is the standard term in every book I've seen, including recent ones (Orrin Robinson's "Old English and Its Closest Relatives", Roger Lass's Old English book). An alternative term is "North Sea Germanic"; but a Google search shows that
- As a synonym for Ingvaeonic, the latter is usually preferred, since "North Sea Germanic" often appears in parens following it.
- Even worse, usage of "North Sea Germanic" is not consistent; it variously means "Ingvaeonic", "Anglo-Saxon-Jute", "Anglo-Frisian", "Ingvaeonic + Scandinavian", etc.
Benwing 21:16, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
- Fair enough - that's all we needed. --Doric Loon 10:07, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Swiss
I have provisionally deleted the following sentence pending some kind of explanation:
- These old sounds are still reflected in many Swiss German dialects in which 'us' (High German: 'uns') is still pronounced 'ues' or 'üs'.
Swiss German was not affected by this law as far as I know. If it is true that uns has become üs then that would presumably be a separate, independent development. As for the Umlaut, that is NOT the original Germanic vowel. Swiss German is interesting, of course, but I don't find it helpful in this article. --Doric Loon 01:15, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Possible source
I found the following through Google Scholar but I cannot actually access it:
- Antonsen, Elmer H.. "On Defining Stages in Prehistoric Germanic". Language 41 (No. 1: Jan. - Mar., 1965): pp. 19-36.
Maybe someone with the required access could check whether it applies? HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 13:52, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Dutch inconsistency
- Note that Dutch is inconsistent, following the law in some words but not others; this must be understood in terms of the standard language drawing from a variety of dialects, only some of which were affected by the sound change.
Based on the present examples, it looks like it could simply be that Dutch has nf -> f but not nth -> th -> d or ns -> s. If this isn't the case, could someone give examples to show that Dutch does lose nth and ns sometimes or doesn't lose nf sometimes? --Ptcamn 16:49, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Goose / Gander
In English, it appears that goose was affected by the law, but gander remained unaffected. --DPoon 09:08, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
- True: the /n/ in gander is not followed by a spirant, making the law inoperable. Note that although goose and gander (and also gannet) do come from the same Indo-European root, their history is separate from pre-Germanic times, so we wouldn't expect them to develop in parallel. This is not like lion and lioness, where the morphological mechanism is still productive, or even fox and vixen, where it was productive in relatively recent linguistic history. --Doric Loon 22:11, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
