Luxembourgish Lessons #2: More on the Eifel Rule

1801

Welcome to number two of the Luxembourgish lessons. I put up the first Luxembourgish lesson around four months ago as a little test to see how future lessons would look. Now, since I want to make sure that my information is accurate, as a heads up, the lesson posts will likely be irregular.

In the meantime, I have two Luxembourgish Memrise courses open which teach both Luxembourgish vocabulary and grammar, so feel free to use them as you wish:

Luxembourgish Vocabulary

Luxembourgish Grammar

Eifel Rule: Additional Applications and Exceptions

In the last lesson, I gave a little bit of an introduction on the Eifeler Regel or Eifel Rule, which discusses the deletion of the letter -n(n) at the ends of words. The first rules I gave earlier are listed below:

The final -n(n) of words is deleted before most consonants
It is not deleted before the consonants d, h, n, t, or z
It is not deleted before a vowel
It is not deleted at the end of a sentence or before punctuation

Now I will go into some other rules on Eifel Rule

Disclaimer:

Some of the conditions that I list was information that I discovered only recently, as apparently most of the information I found on English sites was rather limited, so I had to go to German and Luxembourgish sites to find more

Deletion is optional before the following words beginning with the letter "s": säin, si/se/s', seng, sou, and sech. Therefore "when she speaks" can be written as wann si schwätzt or wa si schwätzt
Proper nouns and loanwords are not affected by Eifel Rule, meaning names such as Johann and nouns such as Maschinn undergo no change
Words ending in -in and -ioun are also unaffected by Eifel Rule, meaning that words such as Léierin and Kommunikatioun undergo no change
Words ending in -nn (except for verbs such as sinn, hunn, gesinn, etc.) are unaffected by Eifel Rule, for example: Déi dënn Fra, not Déi dë Fra
Certain words (for historical reasons) that end in -n or -nn undergo no change whatsoever, such as Mann, Kroun, Loun, Sonn, blann, etc.
Eifel Rule does not apply when the following word begins with the letter "y" which is immediately followed by a consonant. For example: vun Ypres, not vu Ypres. However, if "y" is followed by a vowel, Eifel Rule applies. For example: de Yuri, not den Yuri
For words that end in -e in the singular with an -en ending in the plural, whenever the plural is affected by Eifel Rule, a diaeresis (¨) must be used to differentiate. For example, Chance (s) -> Chancen (pl.) -> Chancë (pl. + Eifel Rule)
Eifel Rule does apply when the following word begins with a vowel that sounds like a consonant. For example, de One-Night-Stand, not den One-Night-Stand