# Umlaut **Domain:** Linguistics / Historical Phonology **Doc Type:** Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Umlaut**, or **i-mutation** in its English form, is a vowel change caused by a sound in a following syllable. In early Germanic, an *i* or *j* in an ending pulled the root vowel forward in the mouth; the ending later vanished, leaving the changed vowel behind. Modern English shows the results in *foot / feet*, *mouse / mice*, *man / men*, and *full / fill*. Umlaut differs from [[wiki/Ablaut|Ablaut]]: ablaut is an inherited grammatical pattern, while umlaut is an assimilation, one sound reshaping its neighbor. ## Relationships - **Contrast:** [[wiki/Ablaut|Ablaut]]. - **Process family:** [[wiki/Sound Change|Sound Change]]. - **Practice:** [[wiki/Phonetic Etymology|Phonetic Etymology]]. - **Corpus project:** [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]], Bryant McGill's symbolic language engine, built from 1994 into the mid-2000s, with its phonological engine, sound indexes, and lexical knowledge graph. ## Sources - Richard M. Hogg and David Denison, eds., *A History of the English Language* (Cambridge University Press, 2006). ## See Also [[wiki/Ablaut|Ablaut]] · [[wiki/Phonetics|Phonetics]]