![a with umlaut ipa a with umlaut ipa](https://ipanow.com/images/carousel/latin.png)
The following examples show how, when final -i was lost, the variant sound -ȳ- became a new phoneme in Old English: Umlaut and final vowel The fronted variant caused by umlaut was originally allophonic (a variant sound automatically predictable from the context), but it later became phonemic (a separate sound in its own right) when the context was lost but the variant sound remained. However, for example, proto-Old English /æ/ became /e/ in, for example, */bæddj-/ > /bedd/ 'bed'. This happened less often in the Germanic languages, partly because of earlier vowel harmony in similar contexts.
![a with umlaut ipa a with umlaut ipa](http://blog.terminologiaetc.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IPA-vowels-300x206.png)
Thus, for example, West Germanic * mūsiz "mice" shifted to proto- Old English * mȳsiz, which eventually developed to modern mice, while the singular form * mūs lacked a following /i/ and was unaffected, eventually becoming modern mouse. Whenever a back vowel ( /ɑ/, /o/ or /u/, whether long or short) occurred in a syllable and the front vowel /i/ or the front glide /j/ occurred in the next, the vowel in the first syllable was fronted (usually to /æ/, /ø/, and /y/ respectively).The precise developments varied from one language to another, but the general trend was this: Germanic umlaut is a specific historical example of this process that took place in the unattested earliest stages of Old English and Old Norse and apparently later in Old High German, and some other old Germanic languages. The vowels of proto-Germanic and their general direction of change when i-mutated in the later Germanic dialects. If a word has two vowels with one far back in the mouth and the other far forward, more effort is required to pronounce the word than if the vowels were closer together therefore, one possible linguistic development is for these two vowels to be drawn closer together. Umlaut is a form of assimilation or vowel harmony, the process by which one speech sound is altered to make it more like another adjacent sound. While Germanic umlaut has had important consequences for all modern Germanic languages, its effects are particularly apparent in German, because vowels resulting from umlaut are generally spelled with a specific set of letters: ä, ö, and ü, usually pronounced / ɛ/ (formerly / æ/), / ø/, and / y/. Germanic umlaut, as covered in this article, does not include other historical vowel phenomena that operated in the history of the Germanic languages such as Germanic a-mutation and the various language-specific processes of u-mutation, nor the earlier Indo-European ablaut ( vowel gradation), which is observable in the conjugation of Germanic strong verbs such as sing/sang/sung. An example of the resulting vowel alternation is the English plural foot ~ feet (from Proto-Germanic * fōts, pl.
![a with umlaut ipa a with umlaut ipa](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/5d/c0/90/5dc090363e15a77ab0bd55f39e877b46.jpg)
It took place separately in various Germanic languages starting around AD 450 or 500 and affected all of the early languages except Gothic. The Germanic umlaut (sometimes called i-umlaut or i-mutation) is a type of linguistic umlaut in which a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel ( fronting) or a front vowel becomes closer to / i/ ( raising) when the following syllable contains /i/, /iː/, or / j/. Wikipedia's multilingual support templates may also be used.
#A WITH UMLAUT IPA ISO#
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