Historical Germanic phonemic interdental(s)

[Kirk]

Looking over various Germanic languages, it's clear most of them have over time gotten rid of historical Germanic interdentals /θ/ and/or /ð/ (I'm talking about the IPA symbols representing spoken language, not orthography here), while only a couple (few?) Germanic languages have retained them.

Interestingly, the continental Germanic languages appear to have lost the historical phonemic interdentals (I say "historical" and "phonemic" because interdentals may show up as allophones in languages that may not otherwise have them, like in Danish, and anyway they don't correspond to proto-Germanic interdentals), while I know at least English and Icelandic largely have retained them.

I find it fascinating that with all the Germanic languages there are, which all come from a common ancestor(s) with interdentals, most have long since replaced them with dentals. A couple questions:

1)What other Germanic languages besides English and Icelandic have retained historical Germanic phonemic interdentals (I also mean strictly in the spoken language--I know Faroese still has them in orthography but are actually not produced as such)?

2)Is there any theory in historical Germanic linguistics as to why so many Germanic languages lost this feature?

3)When did this feature drop out? Was there a "Great Interdental Plague" in Germanic languages that all of a sudden spread? Or was the process more gradual (I'd assume the latter)?

[JackFrost]

Well, I believe one Swedish dialect still preserves the "eth". I'm not sure if it's only one or a few. Hunef (username) would answer this question better than me.

[Hunef]

The /ð/ phoneme is quite well preserved in some mainland Scandinavian dialects, like most (?) danish ones, some norwegian and some swedish. (My own local language Jamtlandic spoken in Central Scandinavia has preserved /ð/ after a short vowel in today bisyllabic words, e.g. in sidr 'later', ludu 'barn', hadan 'away from here' etc. The jamtlandic orthography's letter ð is silent though, except after the diphtong ou where it always is /v/ or /g/: souð 'sheep' is pronunced [sOu:v], so ouð /Ou:v/. I guess Faroese ð may be pronunced /v/ or /g/ as well in some contexts. Mulder-23 may explain the rules. Note that the famous faroese old document Seyðabrævið 'The Sheep Letter' would be called Souðbreivið in Jamtlandic. The faroese word has two silent ð's while only the last ð is silent in the jamtlandic counterpart. It may be argued that the /v/ or /g/ in ouð is just a sharpened glide /w/ and that the Old Norse /ð/ has nothing to do with the occuring non-silentness. This "sharpening-of-glides" phenomenon is far more common in Faroese than in Jamtlandic, though.) Some norwegian and swedish dialects have replaced the /θ/ with /ð/ in the beginning of pronouns and adverbs. This is especially true for Dalecarlian where e.g. Old Norse þar /θar/ 'there' is pronunced /ðar/ if it follows a word ending with a vowel. Most certainly the /ð/ pronunciation for Germanic /θ/ was the middle stage in the development into today's /d/ in those languages and dialects which have lost the unvoiced fricative.

The /θ/ > /ð/ development is assumed to have taken place in the 14th century in mainland Scandinavia, and /ð/ (from /θ/) into /d/ somewhat later. In a scandinavian context the process started in Southwestern Denmark and spread to the north. Most novations which have affected the scandinavian languages seem to have originated in Western Denmark. The most well-known is of course the monophtongization of the diphtongs which started in the 10th century in Western Denmark and reached the upper class of Central Sweden in the 11th century. The common people in this region still used the diphtongs for a few more centuries though. (Since otherwise the Finland-Swedish dialects would not have the diphtongs - Southwestern Finland was colonized by central swedes in late Medieval time.) I guess that the /θ/ > /ð/ was introduced later in the common people classes than in the upper classes. Thus, the /θ/ phoneme may have been preserved longer than 14th century in large parts of Mainland Scandinavia, excluding the southern parts. The fact that many dialects are stuck on the middle stage /ð/ supports this conjecture.


The Germanic /ð/ never turned into /d/ in any dialects in Norway and Sweden but rather became silent or was preserved, depending on dialect and context. But I guess that the educated upper classes of Norway and Sweden replaced their naturally silent 'd' with the orthography's non-silent /d/. Because of this, Standard Swedish and to some extent "Standard Norwegian" now has the pronunciation /d/ for Germanic /ð/. (Some exceptions still exist, such as Old Norse góðr [go:ðr] 'good' which today is spelled god in both Norwegian and Swedish but is pronunced [gu:] rather than [gu:d]. My dialect has [gu:] as well since the vowel is long and it is a monosyllabic word, but Dalecarlian has [guo:ð].)

(NB: In ostrobothnic dialects spoken in Western Finland, the Germanic /θ/ seems to have turned into a special palatalized 't' phoneme, which I guess is quite unique in a germanic context. For example, Old Norse þá [θÕ:] is pronunced [To:] in Ostrobothnic, where [T] is supposed to represent a palatalized 't'.)

[Kirk]

Thanks for that detailed explanation, Hunef! I learned a lot. So, apparently /ð/ amd/or /θ/ are still around in some phonological environments in some dialects. But still can't think of or find any Germanic languages which have retained the original interdentals from proto-Germanic as much as Icelandic and English have--are there any other comparable Germanic languages or dialects? In this list each one on the left is the proto-Germanic root, the second is the word in Icelandic and third is the English word.

bathan, bað, bath
wraithíthō, reiði, wrath
thurH, þó, tho(ugh)
thankaz, þakka, thank
thræðús,þráður, thread

Germanic roots from:

http://fordsmender.50megs.com/pgmn.html

[Saaropean]

I don't know any West Germanic language beside English and Scots that still has ð and þ