Germanic Umlaut - Morphological Effects

Morphological Effects

Although umlaut was not a grammatical process, umlauted vowels often serve to distinguish grammatical forms (and thus show similarities to ablaut when viewed synchronically). We can see this in the English word man; in ancient Germanic, the plural of this and some other words had the plural suffix -iz, and the same vowel as the singular. As it contained an i, this suffix caused fronting of the vowel, and, when the suffix later disappeared, the mutated vowel remained as the only plural marker: men. In English, such umlaut-plurals are rare. man, woman, tooth, goose, foot, mouse, louse, brother (archaic or specialized plural in brethren), and cow (poetic and dialectal plural in kine). It also can be found in a few fossilized diminutive forms, such as kitten from cat and kernel from corn. Umlaut is conspicuous when it occurs in one of such a pair of forms, but there are many mutated words without an unmutated parallel form. Germanic actively derived causative weak verbs from ordinary strong verbs by applying a suffix, which later caused umlaut, to a past tense form. Some of these survived into modern English as doublets of verbs, including fell and set vs. fall (older past *fefall) and sit.

Parallel umlauts in some modern Germanic languages

In the above table it is incorrectly suggested that in the 'Dutch' language umlauted plurals do not occur. Nevertheless in the Netherlandish ('Dutch') language umlauted plurals are still quite common. Extreme cases are stad ("town") - steden ("towns") and schip ("ship") - schepen ("ships"). But there are also many nouns with 'short a' in their singular forms that have 'long a' in their plural forms; this is indicated by the consonants following the written 'a' not being doubled in the written plural forms. It should be interesting to know that in Eastern Netherlandish ('Dutch') dialects umlaut-plurals without plural-endings do occur: voet - vuut (instead of voet - voeten). Sometimes the only difference between a dialect singular form and the corresponding plural form of a noun is the length of the noun: singular luus (short) - plural luus (long) (instead of luis - luizen).