Search Results - Indo-European ablaut

The term ablaut (from German ab- in the sense "down, reducing" + Laut "sound") was coined in the early 19th century by the linguist Jacob Grimm, though the phenomenon was first described a century earlier by the Dutch linguist Lambert ten Kate in his book Gemeenschap tussen de Gottische spraeke en de Nederduytsche ("Commonality between the Gothic language and Dutch", 1710).

Vowel gradation is any vowel difference between two related words (e.g. man and woman) or two forms of the same word (e.g. man and men). The difference need not be indicated in the spelling. There are many kinds of vowel gradation in English, as in most languages, and these are discussed generally in the article apophony. Some involve a variation in vowel length (quantitative gradation man/woman), others in vowel colouring (qualitative gradation man/men), and others the complete disappearance of a vowel (reduction to zero could not ? couldn't).

For the study of European languages, one of the most important instances of vowel gradation is the historical Indo-European phenomenon called ablaut, remnants of which can be seen in the English verbs ride, rode, ridden, or fly, flew, flown. For many purposes it is enough to note that these verbs are irregular, but understanding why they are irregular (and indeed why they are actually perfectly regular within their own terms) requires digging back into the grammar of the reconstructed proto-language.