North Sea Germanic


North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic, is a postulated grouping of the northern West Germanic languages that consists of Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon and their descendants.
Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Germanic cultural group or proto-tribe along the North Sea coast that was mentioned by both Tacitus and Pliny the Elder. It is thought of as not a monolithic proto-language but as a group of closely related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison.
The grouping was first proposed in Nordgermanen und Alemannen by German linguist and philologist Friedrich Maurer as an alternative to the strict tree diagrams, which had become popular following the work of 19th-century linguist August Schleicher and assumed the existence of a special Anglo-Frisian group. The other groupings are Istvaeonic, from the Istvaeones, including Dutch, Afrikaans and related languages; and Irminonic, from the Irminones, including the High German languages.

Characteristics

Linguistic evidence for Ingvaeonic is a series of common innovations observed in Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon such as the following:
Several, but not all, characteristics are also found in Dutch, which did not generally undergo the nasal spirant law, retained the three distinct plural endings, and exhibits the -s plural in only a limited number of words. However, it lost the reflexive pronoun and had the same four relic weak verbs in Class III.