Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T05:01:08.309Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Germanic umlaut from a physiological and phonological point of view: Prolegomena to a theory of sound change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

James W. Marchand
James W. Marchand
Affiliation:
University of IllinoisUrbana, IL 61801
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper represents a return to the theme of Germanic umlaut, umlaut in general, and sound change in general. It invokes first the concept of the parameter, then the concept of parametric inertia. That is, since all parameters are produced by physical organs, they are governed by inertia, and this allows a (phonetic) explanation of assimilation (including umlaut) and dissimilation. Further, the concept of a hierarchy of parameters based on a phonetically most similar notion is developed to replace the unworkable phonetically similar criterion in classical phonemics.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , July 1990 , pp. 109 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Abercrombie, David. 1949. “What is a ‘letter’?” Lingua 2:54–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ahn, Jeong K. 1987. “The social stratification of Umlaut in Korean.” Univ. of Texas diss.Google Scholar
Anderson, John M., and Ewen, Colin J.. 1987. Principles of dependency phonology. Cambridge studies in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Antonsen, Elmer H. 1960. “The investigation of mutation in the Germanic languages.” Univ. of Illinois diss.Google Scholar
Antonsen, Elmer H. 1964. “Zum Umlaut im Deutschen.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (Tübingen) 86:177–96.Google Scholar
Arend, M. Z. 1934. “Baudouin de Courtenay and the phoneme idea.” Le maître phonétique. 3, 12:2–3.Google Scholar
Austin, William M. 1957. “Criteria for phonetic similarity.” Language 33:538–544.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baltaxe, Christiane A. M. 1978. Foundations of distinctive feature theory. Baltimore: University Park Press.Google Scholar
Basbøll, H. 1982. “Nordic i–umlaut once more: A variational view.” Folia linguistica historica 3:59–86.Google Scholar
Batóg, Tadeusz. 1968. The axiomatic method in phonology. New York: Humanities Press.Google Scholar
Békésy, G. von. 1962. “The structure of the middle ear and the hearing of one's own voice by bone conduction.” Journal of the Acoustical society of America 21:217–232.Google Scholar
Benediktsson, Hreinn. 1972. The first grammatical treatise. Univ. of Iceland Publications in linguistics, 1. Reykjavík: Institute of Nordic linguistics.Google Scholar
Benediktsson, Hreinn. 1982. “Nordic umlaut and breaking: Thirty years of research (1951–1980)” Nordic journal of linguistics 5:1–60.Google Scholar
Brate, Erik. 1926. “Svenska runristare.” Kungliga vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademiens handlingar 33:5–6. Stockholm.Google Scholar
Brough, John. 1951. “Theories of general linguistics in the Sanskrit grammarians.” Transactions of the Philological society, pp. 27–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruffee, Kenneth A. 1986. “Social construction, language, and the authority of knowledge: A bibliographical essay.” College English 48:773–790.Google Scholar
Chase, Richard A., Samuel, Sutton and Daphne, First. 1959. “Bibliography. Delayed auditory feedback.” Journal of speech and hearing research 2:193–200.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam, and Morris, Halle. 1968. The sound patterns of English. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Christie, William M. Jr. 1976. “Another look at classical phonemics.” Language sciences 39:37–39.Google Scholar
Curtius, Ernst Robert. 1948. Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter. 2nd ed.Bern: Francke.Google Scholar
Dain, A. 1949. Les manuscrits. Paris: Les belles lettres.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daunt, Marjorie. 1939. “Old English sound-changes reconsidered in relation to scribal tradition and practice.” Transactions of the Philological society, pp. 108–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denes, Peter B., and Pinson, Elliot N.. 1973. The speech chain. New York: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Dévréesse, Robert. 1954. Introduction à l'étude des manuscrits grecs. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Firth, J. R. 1934. “The word ‘phoneme’. Le maître phonétique 3,12:44–46.Google Scholar
Fischer-Jørgensen, Eli. 1975. Trends in phonological theory:A historical introduction. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.Google Scholar
Garvin, Paul L. 1964. A Prague School reader on esthetics, literary structure, and style. Washington, DC: Georgetown Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, John. 1976. “An overview of autosegmental phonology.” Linguistic analysis 2:23–68.Google Scholar
Gross, Llewellyn. 1959. Symposium on sociological theory. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Hamp, Eric P. 1959. “Final syllables in Germanic and the Scandinavian accent system.” Studia linguistica 13:29–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Zellig S. 1944. “Simultaneous components in phonology.” Language, Monograph 25.Google Scholar
Haugen, Einar. 1950. “First grammatical treatise. The earliest Germanic phonology.” Language 24, No. 4, Supplement.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hogg, Richard, and McCully, C. B.. 1987. Metrical phonology: A course book. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Householder, Fred W. 1967. “Distinctive features and phonetic features.” To honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, 11 October 1966. Vol. 2. Janua linguarum, series maior, 32. The Hague: Mouton. Pp. 941–944.Google Scholar
Hualde, José Ignacio. 1988. “Autosegmental and metrical spreading in the vowel harmony systems of north-western Spain.” Talk given at Linguistics Seminar, Univ. of Illinois, 13 October 1988.Google Scholar
Jackson, B. D., ed. 1975. Aurelius Augustinus: De dialectica. Ed. Pinborg, Jan. Synthese historical library, 16. Dordrecht: Reidel. Rpt. of ed. of 1949.Google Scholar
Japarize, Z. 1985. Pertseptivnaia fonetika: Osnovnye voprosy. Tbilisi: Metsniereba.Google Scholar
Jones, Daniel. 1957. The history and meaning of the term “phoneme”. Le maître phonétique, July-December, Supplement.Google Scholar
Jung, C. G. 1960. Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle. Collected Works, 8. Bollingen series 20. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Keating, Patricia A. 1988. A survey of phonological features. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Keil, Heinrich. 1961. Grammatici latini. 8 vols. Hildesheim: Olms. Rpt. of ed of 1857–70.Google Scholar
Kraft, Wayne B. 1978. “Attribution and athetization.” Univ. of Illinois diss.Google Scholar
Krámský, Jirií. 1974. Thephoneme: Introduction to the history and theories of a concept. International library of general linguistics, 28. Munich: Fink.Google Scholar
Kratz, Henry. 1960. “The phonemic approach to Umlaut in Old High German and Old Norse.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 59:463–79.Google Scholar
Krause, Wolfgang. 1966. Die Runeninschriften im älteren Futhark. Vol. 1 (Text). Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, philologisch-historische Klasse, 3. Folge, Nr. 65.Google Scholar
Kruszewski, Mikolaj. 1881. Über die Lautabwechslung. Kazan.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter. 1988. “The International Phonetic Alphabet as a hierarchical feature system.” Proceedings of the Fourteenth annual meeting of the Berkeley linguistics society. To appear.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter. and Morris, Halle, 1988. “Some major features of the International Phonetic Alphabet.” Language 64:577–82.Google Scholar
Lane, Harlan. 1970. “Production et perception de la parole: Rapports et differences.” Nouvelles perspectives en phonétique. Institut de Phonétique de l'Université libre de Bruxelles: Conférences et travaux, 1. Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles Pp. 87–114.Google Scholar
Leben, W. 1973. Suprasegmental phonology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Lehiste, Ilse, ed. 1967. Readings in acoustic phonetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Press.Google Scholar
Leonard, Clifford S. 1978. Umlaut in Romance: An essay in linguistic archaeology. Gießener Beiträge ur Sprachwissenschaft, 12. Großen-Linden: Hoffmann.Google Scholar
Lowe, E. A. 1946. “The oldest omission signs in Latin manuscripts.” Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati. Vol 6: Paleografia, bibliografia, varia. Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca apostolica.Google Scholar
Maack, Adalbert. 1959. “Über den Verlauf des Lautwandels.” Phonetica 3:65–89.Google Scholar
Makkai, Valerie Becker, ed. 1912. Phonological theory: Evolution and current practice. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Marchand, James W. 1955/56. “Das akrophonische Prinzip und Wulfilas Alphabet.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 86:265–75.Google Scholar
Marchand, James W. 1956. “The phonemic status of OHG e.” Word 12:82–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marchand, James W. 1956b. “Two alleged late Gothic sound changes.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 55:253–256.Google Scholar
Marchand, James W. 1957. “Germanic *i and *e-Two phonemes or one?” Language 33:346–54.Google Scholar
Marchand, James W. 1959. “Names of Germanic origin in Latin and Romance sources in the study of Germanic philology.” Names 7:167–181.Google Scholar
Marchand, James W. 1973. “Observations on the use of dialect evidence in historical linguistics.” Festschrift for Hans Kurath. Eds. Scholler, Harald and Reidy, John. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, Beiheft, N.F., 9. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Pp. 122–133.Google Scholar
Marchand, James W. 1975. “Towards a sociology of linguistics.” E[ducational] R[esource] I[nformation] C[enter], Document ED 107 146. 1Pp. 11.Google Scholar
Marchand, James W. 1987. “The use of the computer in the humanities.” Ideal 1:35–51.Google Scholar
Panzer, Baldur. 1967. “Die westgermanischen Kurzvokale im Niederdeutschen.” Folia linguistica 1, 3–4:232–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petersen, Gordon E., and Frank, Harary. 1961. “Foundations of phonemic theory.” Proceedings of the symposia in applied mathematics 12:139–64. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society.Google Scholar
Pike, Kenneth L. 1947. Phonemics: A technique for reducing languages to writing. Univ. of Michigan Publications in linguistics, 3. Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Pike, Kenneth L. 1950. Axioms and procedures for reconstructions in comparative linguistics…:An experimentalsyllabus. Glendale, CA: Summer Institute of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Poser, William J. 1982. “Phonological representations and action-at-a-distance.” van der Hulst, Harry and Smith, Norval, eds. The structure of phonological representation, Vol. 2. Dordrecht: Foris. Pp. 121–58.Google Scholar
Raschellà, Fabrizio D., ed. 1982. The so-called Second grammatical treatise. Florence: Felice le Monnier.Google Scholar
Sapir, Edward. 1933. “La realité psychologique du phonème.” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 30:247–265.Google Scholar
Schane, Sanford. 1971. “The phoneme revisited.” Language 47:503–21.Google Scholar
Simmler, Franz. 1981. Graphematisch-phonematische Studien zum althochdeutschen Konsonantismus. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar
Sonderegger, Stefan. 1959. “Die Umlautfrage in den germanischen Sprachen.” Kratylos 4:1–12.Google Scholar
Spencer, Norman R. 1988. “Anomaly and analogy: On the function of vowel mutation in the history of Icelandic nominal morphology (Umlaut).” Univ. of Illinois diss.Google Scholar
Stewart, Ann Harleman. 1976. Graphic representation of modeh in linguistic theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Stockwell, Robert P. 1962. “On the utility of an overall pattern in historical English phonology.” Preprints of the papers for the Ninth international congress of linguists. Cambridge, MA. Pp.307–312.Google Scholar
Twadell, W. Freeman. 1938. “A note on Old High German Umlaut.” Monatshefte für den deutschen Unterricht 30:177–81.Google Scholar
Vennemann, Theo. 1984. “Hochgermanisch und Niedergermanisch. Die Verzweigungstheorie der germanischdeutschen Lautverschiebungen.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (Tübingen) 106:1–45.Google Scholar
Vennemann, Theo. 1986. “Rückumläut (sic).” Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries: In honour of Jacek Fisiak on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. Eds. Kartovsky, Dieter and Szwedek, Aleksander. Vol. 1: Linguistic theory and historical linguistics. Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 701–724.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zupitza, Julius, ed. 1880. ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar. Sammlung englischer Denkmäler in kritischen Ausgaben, 1:1. Berlin.Google Scholar