What is the name of a sound shift law under which the German vowel "a" changes to the English "i", e.g.
Macht -> might;
Nacht -> night
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Sign up to join this communityWhat is the name of a sound shift law under which the German vowel "a" changes to the English "i", e.g.
Macht -> might;
Nacht -> night
Sound changes happen from an ancestor language to a descendant language, not from one modern language to another. However, in this case, German seems to have preserved the vowels from Proto-Germanic pretty faithfully, while English hasn't. So it's still valid to talk about a shift from PGmc *a
to OE /i/
.
The key here is called Anglo-Frisian brightening: *a
shifted forward to something like [æ]
in most environments. In Old English, front vowels then got raised before /xt/
. This is why vowels before English ght are generally higher than before German cht: see also recht~right, etc.
Post-OE, the /x/
disappeared and lengthened the vowel in compensation, giving something like /ni:t/
. The Great Vowel Shift then turned this into modern /najt/
.