Vowel Mutation in English: Alteration and Irregularity
Vowel Mutation in English: Alteration and Irregularity

Summary/Abstract: Vowel mutation is a process that occurs in several languages to indicate a change in the inflection of a noun. Alternative coinings include vowel alteration or umlaut, being a means by which the vowel sounds of certain words are altered to indicate a grammatical shift or adjustment, such as tense, number, or case. It is an important feature of the sentence structure of several languages and conveys a change in the grammatical function of a noun. This process, common, for instance, for German and Old English, is no longer a feature of Modern English. In present-day English, vowel mutation is not a regular inflectional process and only occurs in the case of a small number of irregular nouns. The vowel shift is not triggered by grammatical changes in the word itself, but rather by the inherent phonetic properties of the words.

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