Northeadish: Difference between revisions

Northeadish is a Germanic language which, while similar to [[Category:North_Germanic_languages|North]] and [[Category:West_Germanic_languages|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 ''druðþ''.  A similar process occurs with other Germanic words such as ‘morning’ (''*murganaz'' → ''mrugan'' →  ''m̩brugan'' → ''brugɴ'').