Umlaut remains an active morphological process in living Germanic languages
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Peer-reviewed linguistic literature and studies on synchronic phonology confirm that umlaut remains present as a morphological and phonological alternation process in modern Germanic languages such as German and Icelandic.
Abstract
This chapter focuses on i-umlaut in German (involving vowel fronting) and Icelandic (involving fronting and unrounding), and on u-umlaut in Icelandic (involving rounding and fronting of the vowel /a/). ‘Umlaut’ refers to a variety of word-internal vowel alternations found in Germanic languages, which are the present-day reflexes of regressive assimilation induced by suffix vowels of certain kinds. I-umlaut in present-day Standard German is discussed as a partially productive, partially unproductive historical remnant of a word-final high front vowel. In contrast, u-umlaut in Icelandic is a far more productive phenomenon, although the common view that it still involves a synchronically active phonological assimilation process is shown to be problematic. In both languages, umlaut is triggered by derivational and inflectional morphology alike. Various approaches to the interpretation of umlaut in recent theoretical literature are discussed as well.
German
The umlaut ü in German is pronounced ue, and is less used in modern German. Historical name-spellings should always keep the umlaut if it was used for that name. Swedish, Norwegian, Danish
The Scandinavian languages treat the characters with diacritics ä, ö and å as new and separate letters of the alphabet, and sort them after z. Usually ä is sorted as equal to æ (ash) and ö is sorted as equal to ø (o-slash). Also, aa, when used as an alternative spelling to å, is sorted as such. Other letters modified by diacritics are treated as variants of the underlying letter, with the exception that ü is frequently sorted as y. Non-Roman scripts
Scripts for semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew have a wider variety of diacritics. This is partly because the scripts for semitic languages were originally formed without separate letters for vowels, and partly because some of the languages (Arabic in particular) are spoken in a number of dialects. The diacritics in Hebrew and Arabic are not always used, however. References
- ↑ /daɪəˈkrɪtɪk/
- ↑ Thomas Burns McArthur and Roshan McArthur (2005). Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press.
In this first book-length study of synchronic umlaut, a comprehensive comparative analysis of the phonology and morphology of the umlaut alternation in present-day German and the Austronesian language Chamorro is presented in the framework ...
In this first book-length study of synchronic umlaut, a comprehensive comparative analysis of the phonology and morphology of the umlaut alternation in present-day German and the Austronesian language Chamorro is presented in the framework of Optimality Theory. A fresh perspective of the phonology-morphology interface and the interaction between segmental and metrical structure with wider cross-linguistic implications is developed, including a new conception of morphological conditioning based on morphological faithfulness and Representation as Pure Markedness. The Chamorro data collected for this study contribute significantly to the documentation of this endangered language.
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