Abstract
Our understanding of the relative chronology and linguistic geography of velar palatalization in West Germanic remains limited. A major obstacle is the lack of evidence for the earlier stages of the western Franconian dialects. An examination of the origins of the spelling <gh>, common in medieval Dutch as well as in the Old High German Isidor, reveals a relationship with velar palatalization. The view that <gh> goes back to Merovingian Latin and that its later use in Middle Dutch is a borrowing of an Old French spelling practice is untenable. Instead, the spelling is an internal development by Germanic scribes of an established model with diacritical <h> inherited from Latin. If Gmc. *g in the western Franconian dialects is analyzed as a voiced velar fricative, then the distinction <g ~ gh> points to an opposition between velar and palatalized reflexes of Gmc. *g.
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