The problem with Ingveonic (which is also called North Sea Germanic) is, that it is not clearly defined what this term stands
for. It is usually used for language phenomena, which occur at the coast, but it is quite flexible used regarding time and place. Moreover it does not belong to a certain tribe but appears in nearly all regions close to the North Sea coast and its intensity gets more and more lost the farther one moves inland away from the sea. Nevertheless, I will use this term here because there are round about twenty Ingveonic characteristics shared by Old English, Old Frisian, Old Dutch, and Old Low German. For example, all of them show a high similarity regarding the masculine third person pronoun in the nominative singular:
Old Low German Old English Old Dutch Old Frisian
he he/he he/hie hi/he
The dissimilarity to the Old High German form for this pronoun ‘er’ is obvious. Moreover, Old Low German, Old Dutch, Old English, and Old Frisian show the same rule in forming the plural. In all these languages there is only one form for the first, second and third person plural (e.g. English: we
have, you
have, they
have; Low German: wi
hebbt, ji
hebbt, se
hebbt; in contrast to High German: wir
haben, ihr
habt, sie
haben). An Ingveonic phenomenon, which is even more striking, is the loss of nasals before voiceless fricatives (
/ƒ
/, /h/, /s/). It is assumed that before the nasals were dropped the following vowels were nasalized. Later on this nasalization of the vowels changed into a lengthening as it can be seen in Old English, Old Frisian and Old Low German
fif ‘five’ which is
funf/finf in High German. The same contrast is shown by comparing the Old English words for ‘goose’ and ‘other’ with the Old High German ones: Old English:
gos, oþer; Old High German:
gans, andar. There is one more Ingveonic phenomenon, which I would like to mention. In words where /
k/was followed by /
i/, the /
k/ was slightly palatized. This can be seen in the Old English words ciese (‘cheese’), cinn (‘chin’), cild (‘child’) and circe (‘church’). As one can see, the palatization of the Old English words gave way to the modern affricative /
c/. In Low German, this is a bit different. There the palatization took place, too, as words like antkiennien (German: ‘erkennen’, English: ‘recognize’, folcsciepe (German: ‘Völkerschaft’, English: ‘community of nations’) and kiesur (German: ‘Kaiser’, English: ‘emperor’) which were found in texts of the 10th century prove. But this phenomenon got lost in written records of Middle Low German (although it is assumed that it occurred much longer in the spoken form of Low German) and so today there are only some occasional forms like Ütze (German: ‘Kröte’, English: ‘toad’ and Sewer (German: ‘Käfer’, English: ‘bug’) still existent.