Singin’ in the Night

Abstract

Starting from present-day German Nachtigall ‘nightingale’, which shows an uncommon and unexpected i-linker, this article provides a morphological analysis of the word and its cognates. Through the frame of historical linguistics, and in particular the historical phonology and morphology of Proto-Germanic, it can be shown that Nachtigall and its Germanic cognates witness a relic word-formation that can be traced back to a delocatival compound in Proto-Indo-European. Comparative evidence allows for just such an etymology within poetic phraseology as well.