Glottolog: nort3175 | ||
 | ||
Geographic
distribution: Originally the North Sea coast from Friesland to Jutland Linguistic classification: Indo-European
Germanic
West Germanic
Ingvaeonic Subdivisions: Anglo-Frisian
Low German | ||
Ingvaeonic /ˌɪŋviːˈɒnɪk/, also known as North Sea Germanic, is a postulated grouping of the northern West Germanic languages, consisting of Old Frisian, Old English, and Old Saxon, and their descendants.
Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Germanic cultural group or proto-tribe along the North Sea coast. It is not thought of as a monolithic proto-language, but rather as a group of closely related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison.
The grouping was first proposed in Nordgermanen und Alemanen (1942) by German linguist and philologist Friedrich Maurer, as an alternative to the strict tree diagrams that had become popular following the work of 19th-century linguist August Schleicher and that assumed the existence of a special Anglo-Frisian group. The other groupings are Istvaeonic, from the Istvaeones, including Dutch, Afrikaans, and related languages; and Irminonic, from the Irminones, including the High German languages.
Characteristics
Linguistic evidence for Ingvaeonic are common innovations observed in Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon such as the following:
Several, but not all, of the characteristics are also found in Dutch. It did not generally undergo the nasal spirant law (except for a few words), it kept the three plural endings distinct and it did not have the -s plural. However, it underwent near-full monophthongization (some instances of -ei- persisted), lost the reflexive pronoun (even if it later regained it by borrowing) and had the same four relic verbs in weak class 3.