English
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:
- month - derives from Old English monaþ (cf. German Monat); the intervening vowel rendered the law inapplicable here.
- tenth - from Middle English tenthe. The original Germanic *tehundô, which was regularised to *tehunþô in early Ingvaeonic, was affected by the law, producing Old English teogoþa, tēoþa (Modern English tithe). But the force of analogy with the cardinal number ten caused Middle English speakers to recreate the regular ordinal and re-insert the nasal consonant.
- plinth - a loanword in Modern English from Greek (πλίνθος "brick, tile").
Likewise, the rare occurrences of the combinations -nf-, -mf- and -ns- have similar explanations.
- answer - originally had an intervening dental: Old English andswaru.
- unfair - the prefix un- is still productive.
Read more about this topic: Ingvaeonic Nasal Spirant Law
Famous quotes containing the word english:
“I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my death-bed could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back to her soil. I would not even feed her worms if I could help it.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)
“While abroad, he met with a very salacious English woman, whose liberality retrieved his fortune, with several circumstances more to the honor of his vigor than his morals.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)