Northeadish

Northeadish is a Germanic language which, while similar to North and West Germanic languages due to many areal similarities, does not belong to either of these branches. The name “Northeadish” is a compound of ‘north’ and ‘thead’ (an ancient word referring to a folk or people). A late sound change (metathesis) in the language caused the word *nurþ ‘north’ to become *nruþ, which, being difficult to pronounce, corrected itself through a process of stop-insertion (becoming *n̩druþ). Later still, the nasal component of word-initial pre-nasalized stops (all of which occur only because of this process) were deleted, leaving present-day druþ. A similar process occurs with other Germanic words such as ‘morning’ (*murganaz → mrugan → m̩brugan → brugɴ).