Suffixes "ung" and "ing"

Question

I already asked a question about the alternation in germanic languages between the ing and ung forms of this suffix on the Linguistics Stack Exchange, but I didn't receive any satisfying answer and I thought that maybe this was the place to get better information on this topic.

I am aware that the ing form is used in Dutch, but I also know that an ig form is used in High Alemannic Dialects, frequently heard in Swiss German. Is this form with the i vowel used in any other High German dialect group other than High Alemannic?

Answer 1

Those German -ung nouns have very little in common with -ing verb forms as the gerundium/present participle e.g. in English.

In German, a noun made from the infinitive serves a similar function as the English gerund. The German present participle is built from the infinitive and the ending -d. The -ig ending you mentioned is used for building adjectives from nouns – not specifically in Alemannic dialects but German in general.

The -ung nouns in contrary are additional nouns focusing on the outcome of an action rather than the action itself. They are a step away from the nominalized infinitive.

So, if there was a connection between -ung and -ing words, it has long been lost.

Answer 2

As a Swabian I can confirm that this is also the case in Swabian, but it's diminishing. You'll mainly hear it from older people and in smaller villages, as the young mostly don't speak dialect. (Note: They still have an noticable Swabian accent, but no Swabian vocabulary). I also can say that this ing/ig/ich endings don't only apply to ung, but many other endings, too:
"Dooschdig" is "Donnerstag"

But: This is not generally the case. In fact, Swabian varies from town to town and there are many "dialects" of Swabian itself. Also, ung is not always formed with i, but sometimes with o, too, sometimes it's completly ommited. Now that I think about it, Swabian is not very consistent...

Answer 3

While I do not know for sure whether similar forms as in Alemannic are also found in other dialects, I know that some conservative Alemannic dialects use the -ung ending, not the -ig ending, e.g. Seisler German or old-fashioned urban Bernese German Zytung ‘newspaper, tiding’.

Based on that observation, it seems probable that the form with -ig is a relatively recent development, probably influenced by the homophonous adjective ending -ig as in wichtig ‘important’.

This means that the alternation between Alemannic -ig and Standard German -ung is probably not a reflex of the original ablaut alternation between Proto-Germanic *-ingō/-ungō.

Answer 4

If it helps to know, there are also very few Swiss German dialects that use '-ing' like Dutch does, e.g. Ziiting for Zeitung (vs Ziitig in say Zürich dialect). As far as I know, this is only used in Canton Schaffhausen in northern-eastern Switzerland, perhaps in the past it was used further afield. At present, it is seriously diminishing, possibly only used by elderly, rural speakers. As a native speaker of Schaffhausen dialect, I'd never use the '-ing' ending, always '-ig', unless I'm using '-ing' as a sort of shibboleth.

Re the '-ig' ending, it is used outside of High Alemannic in both Highest Alemannic and Low Alemannic dialects and, as a previous comment has already pointed out, in Swabian.