Why 'Mice', not 'Mouses'? I-umlaut in English

it's a shame you can't be here because it's very nice gray sort of atmospheric day with the birds popping over um but this is going to be a relatively short video just because i'm a bit snowed under with work and things at the moment but i'll do a few longish ones in the in the near future um and it's just to clarify a bit of terminology that's thrown around a lot uh in relation to germanic linguistics but it's not always completely clear what it means and that is i um as it applies to english so i i think there are a few few videos covering this uh in in other old germanic languages as well but this is this is going to be specifically focusing on old english most english plurals nowadays are formed by adding an ending to the root word so phone and phones table and tables book and books and so on and the same thing was the case in old english but there were more potential endings depending on case and also what form the noun had taken in earlier stages of the language but there are also words where you mark the plural by changing the vowel in the word and we see one example in our little friend here this is a mouse but two of them would be mice instead of adding an ending you just change the vowel to make the plural and that applies to words like goose and geese man and men and it also applies in other situations where it's not a plural distinction like old and elder and you get this kind of pattern throughout the germanic languages but you don't find this kind of vowel alternation when you go beyond the germanic languages to something like latin latin has the word mousse but the plural moris and you can see that the all stays the same in the singular and the plural and if you look at the word for goose you have a and anseris and this is actually cognate with the english word goose the r here is cognate with the u and goose but there's no vowel alternation between the singular and the plural in latin it's very important to remember english didn't get these words from latin and latin didn't get them from the germanic languages they've inherited them from common ancestors and you have lots of that kind of evidence in other indo-european languages with again no alternation between the singular and the plural so that's good evidence that this vowel alternation is a germanic thing so now we look to an older stage of english proto-germanic spoken about two thousand years ago in the nominative case in proto-germanic you had mousse and mosses one mousse many moosies and for goose you had one france and many ransis and neither of those have that that vowel alternation they're pretty much the equivalent of mouse mouse's goose gooses and some of you will very wisely point out well proto-germanic is reconstructed by linguists so if if all of the modern dramatic languages have this vowel alternation between single and plural why don't we reconstruct it in proto-germanic and that's a very good question and the answer is because not all attested germanic languages have this vowel alternation so gothic doesn't seem to have i umlaut gothic is the earliest written germanic language and if it didn't have this vowel alternation then we have two options either this vowel alternation appeared after gothic split off from the rest of the languages or gothic had a massive regularization that neutralized all these vowel alternations at once and from what we know about language development in general the first option is a lot more likely but that still doesn't explain what caused these vowel alternations the answer is a linguistic process called assimilation sometimes sounds change to become more like sounds that are near them so take this word in southern english it used to be pronounced do you do but over the last 60 years or so the year has assimilated to the d in front of it and become je which is a post-alveolar sound that's closer to d so du has become jew and this happened with vowels in the early germanic languages so in the plural morsi's the all sound assimilated to the e by fronting moving further forward in the mouth but it retained the lip rounding of all so that it was muci's mucis so you then have one mousse many mucies the same thing happened with the other vowels and over time these unstressed endings are reduced and eroded away but it didn't really matter because you could still tell the difference between the singular and the plural forms based on the vowel difference just like you can today so then by the time of old english you had one moose one ghost many goose and later in the old english period er unrounded in most dialects leaving a which made the difference even more obvious one gauce many gays and later still the same thing happened with e it unrounded to e leaving moose and mist and by unrounded i mean the lips stopped being rounded when people were saying the vowels so by this point these vowel alterations were standard in english and then the great vowel shift in the sort of 13 14 1500s changed them to mouse and mice goose and geese and that also accounts for why the plural of moose isn't meis because the word moose is a loan word that came into english after those vowel alternations were already set so it just took the regular ending moose mooses there are some words that used to have iron plurals but don't anymore because they became regularized and people just started using the normal plural ending and some of those survived until recently in dialects so for example one cow many kai in most dialects that's been regularized to one cow many cows although i'm sure kai is still a plural in some areas one interesting example is the word book so nowadays it's one book many books but in old english this had i um one bork many and you'll notice that the k turns into a chair in the plural bork because of a change called palatalization that affected the k sound wherever it occurred around the vowels [Music] in old english so if that had survived into modern english it would be one book many beach that may or may not be related to the name of the beach tree nobody's completely sure thank you very much for watching uh sorry if the wind's had any effect on the noise the sound and i'll talk to you soon thank you

Channel: Simon Roper

Views: 73,745

Keywords: i-umlaut, i-mutation, germanic umlaut, proto-germanic, old english, historical linguistics, history of english, mouse, mice

Id: -NuZ1FmCewg

Length: 6min 0sec (360 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021