glide occurred in the next, the vowel in the first syllable was raised. This happened less often in the Germanic languages, partly because of earlier vowel harmony in similar contexts. However, for example, proto-Old English became in, for example, > 'bed'. The fronted variant caused by umlaut was originally allophonic (a variant sound automatically predictable from the context), but it later became phonemic (a separate sound in its own right) when the context was lost but the variant sound remained. The following examples show how, when final was lost, the variant sound became a new phoneme in Old English: Outcomes in modern spelling and pronunciation The following table surveys how Proto-Germanic vowels which later underwent i-umlaut generally appear in modern languages — though there are many exceptions to these patterns owing to other sound-changes and chance variations. The table gives two West Germanic examples (English and German) and two North Germanic examples (Swedish, from the east, and Icelandic, from the west). Spellings are marked by pointy brackets (⟨...⟩) and pronunciation, given in the international phonetic alphabet, in slashes (/.../). Whereas modern English does not have any special letters for vowels produced by i-umlaut, in German the letters , , and almost always represent umlauted vowels (see further below). Likewise, in Swedish , , and and Icelandic , , , and are almost always used of vowels produced by i-umlaut. However, German represents vowels from multiple sources, which is also the case for in Swedish and Icelandic. German orthography German orthography is generally consistent in its representation of i-umlaut. The umlaut diacritic, consisting of two dots above the vowel, is used for the fronted vowels, making the historical process much more visible in the modern language than is the case in English: – , – , – , – . This is a neat solution when pairs of words with and without umlaut mutation are compared, as in umlauted plurals like – ("mother" – "mothers"). However, in a small number of words, a vowel affected by i-umlaut is not marked with the umlaut diacritic because its origin is not obvious. Either there is no unumlauted equivalent or they are not recognized as a pair because the meanings have drifted apart. The adjective ("ready, finished"; originally "ready to go") contains an umlaut mutation, but it is spelled with rather than as its relationship to ("journey") has, for most speakers of the language,