SHORTENING OF THE LONG CONSONANTS IN DANISH AND WEST GERMANIC LANGUAGES

Abstract

The original Common Germanic long consonants as well as the long consonants developed in different Old Germanic languages were shortened in the Middle Germanic period (12th–16th c.). Due to inconsistency of Old and Middle Germanic orthography one has to rely on modern data in order to answer the question about the history of long consonants. Modern Danish and the West Germanic languages are characterised by a correlation of syllable cut (or syllable contact) with short vowels only in closed syllables. In words with close contact (CVC, CVCV(C)) the morpheme final consonant cannot be separated by syllable boundary from the preceding root vowel (Dan. falde /falǝ/, Ger. fallen /falǝn/, Dut. vallen /falǝ/). The morpheme final consonants do not have any syllable initial features. At the previous stage of these languages, which remains in Scandinavian languages (exept Danish) and in some High German and Frisian dialects, the second part of a long consonant has a clear syllable initial character, cf. Shw. falla /fal-la/. The shortening of the long consonants in Danish and in the West Germanic languages is explained in the article within the framework of Mel’nikov’s hypothesis about language as a self-adjusting system, with the possibility to rebuild the system in accordance with a certain task. Thus, the long consonants in the Danish and West Germanic language have lost their morpheme final and syllable initial part in order to provide the coincidence of syllable and morpheme boundaries in close contact words. Close contact is a very productive syllable type in modern Germanic languages (especially in English and Danish) and a lot of original open contact words have changed to that type of contact. This development together with some other changes (increasing difference between syllable (and morpheme) initials and finals and the development of tones) has led to increasing similarity between the Germanic languages with the correlation of syllable cut and the syllabic languages of South-East Asia.