Distribution of the primary Germanic groups ca. 1 CE.

Ingvaeonic, also known as North Sea Germanic, is a postulated grouping of the West Germanic languages that would fork into Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon and according to some the local dialect of West-Flanders. The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three traditional branches of the Germanic family of Languages and include languages such as English Old Frisian was the West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries by the people who had settled in the area between the Rhine Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German ( ISO 639 -3 code osx) is the earliest recorded form of Low German, documented from the 9th century West Flemish (West Flemish Vlaemsch/Vlaams, Dutch: West-Vlaams, French: Flamand occidental) is a group of Dutch dialects spoken in It must not be thought of as a monolithic proto-language, but as a group of closely related dialects that were also influenced by other groups of Germanic dialects.

North Sea Germanic has been proposed by the German linguist Friedrich Maurer who criticized the strict tree diagrams that had been used for the subdivision of language families since 19th century linguist August Schleicher. Friedrich "Fritz" Maurer (June 18 1912 – July 10 1958 was an Austrian Field handball player who competed in the 1936 Summer Olympics. List of language familiesA language family is a group of Languages related by descent from a common ancestor called the Proto-language of that family August Schleicher ( February 19, 1821 – December 6, 1868) was a German linguist born in Meiningen ( Duchy He rejected Anglo-Frisian as a historical subdivision of West Germanic. The Anglo-Frisian languages (sometimes Insular Germanic) are a group of Ingvaeonic West Germanic languages consisting of Old English

Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Germanic cultural group or proto-tribe along the North Sea coast. The Ingaevones or Ingvaeones ("people of Yngvi " as described in However, the identification of North Sea Germanic, the common ancestor of Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon with the language of the Ingvaeones is disputed.

Characteristics

Linguistic evidence for Ingvaeonic are common innovations observed in Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon such as the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, the loss of the Germanic reflexive pronoun, the monophthongization of Germanic *ai to ē/ā, and deflexion such as the reduction of the three Germanic verbal plural forms into one form. In Historical linguistics, the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (also called the Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic nasal spirant law) is a description A monophthong ( Greek μονόφθογγος "monophthongos" = single note) is a "pure" Vowel sound one whose articulation at Deflexion is a linguistic process related to Inflectional languages For English usage of verbs see the wiki article English verbs. Plural is a Grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the Referent in the real world

References

• (German) Stefan Sonderegger (1979): Grundzüge deutscher Sprachgeschichte. Diachronie des Sprachsystems. Band I: Einführung – Genealogie – Konstanten. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-003570-7