Prothesis (linguistics)
Sound change and alternation |
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Fortition |
Dissimilation |
In
Prothesis is different from the adding of a prefix, which changes the meaning of a word.
Prothesis is a metaplasm, a change in spelling or pronunciation. The opposite process, the loss of a sound from the beginning of a word, is called apheresis or aphesis.
Word formation
Prothesis may occur during word formation from
Romance languages
A well-known example is that /s/ +
Thus, Latin status changed to
Turkic languages
Some Turkic languages avoid certain combinations of consonants at the beginning of a word. In Turkish, for instance, Smyrna is called İzmir, and the word station, borrowed from French, becomes Turkish istasyon.
Similarly, in Bashkir, a prosthetic vowel is added to Russian loanwords if a consonant or a consonant cluster appears at the beginning: арыш "rye" from Russian рожь, өҫтәл "table" from Russian стол, эскәмйә "bench" from Russian скамья, etc.
However, Bashkir presents cases of novel prothesis in terms that are inherited from Old Turkic:
Samoyedic languages
In
In some varieties[
Hindi
Hindi words from English have an initial i before sp-, sk- or sm-: school → iskuul, special → ispesal, stop → istahp.
Persian
In Persian, loanwords with an initial sp-, st-, sk- or sm- add a short vowel e at the beginning: spray → esprey, stadium → estadiun, Stalin → Estalin, skate → eskeyt, scan → eskan, etc.
Slavic languages
During their evolution from Proto-Slavic, words in some Slavic languages gained a prothetic /v/ (spelled "w" in Polish).[8]
- Proto-Slavic Common Czechvokno
- Proto-Slavic internal organs") vs. Polish wątroba("liver")
Semitic languages
Some Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, regularly break up initial two-consonant clusters by adding a prothetic vowel. The vowel may be preceded by the glottal stop /ʔ/ (see aleph) or, in Hebrew, /h/, which may be pronounced or simply written.[9]
Because of the triconsonantal root morphology of Semitic languages, the prothetic vowel may appear regularly when the first two consonants of the root lack an intermediate vowel, such as in verb conjugation: Arabic ʼaktubu (I write) from the verb kataba (root ktb).
In Hebrew, prothesis occurs in nouns of Greek origin, such as Aplaton (Plato), itztadion (stadium).
Consonant mutation
Celtic languages
Welsh features h-prothesis only for vowel-initial words. It occurs in words after ei 'her', ein 'our', and eu 'their': oedran 'age' ei hoedran 'her age'. It also occurs with ugain 'twenty' following ar (on) in the traditional counting system: un ar hugain 'twenty-one' (literally, 'one on twenty').
Swiss German
Swiss German features n-prothesis if a word ends with a vowel and the next word begins with a vowel.[citation needed] A dropped final n was originally retained then, but the process now occurs in contexts in which n never existed. A similar process called intrusive-r occurs in some varieties of English.
Sandhi
A prothetic vowel performs external sandhi in Italian: compare la scuola ("the school") vs. in iscuola ("at school"). It is, therefore, conjectured both that the origins of the Romance prothesis are phonetical, rather than grammatical. Prothesis originally broke consonant clusters if the preceding word ended in a consonant. There was no prothesis in the Romance dialects that had lost their terminal consonants.[10]
Second language
Phonetic rules of a
James L. Barker writes: "If an Arab, an East Indian, a Frenchman, Spaniard, or Italian is given the following sentence to read: I want to speak Spanish, he reads it in the following manner: I want to speak (i)/(e)Spanish. In this case there is no 'parasitic' i or e before sp of speak, but there is before sp in Spanish".[12]
See also
References
- ^ "prothesis". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- ^ "prothesis". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary.
- Perseus Project
- ^ Trask, Robert Lawrence. 1999. A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. London: Routledge, p. 296.
- ^ "prosthesis". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary.,
- Perseus Project
- ^ Heinrich Lausberg, Romanische Sprachwissenschaft [Romance Linguistics], Vol. 1, Berlin, 1956, pp.64–65 (in German)
- ISBN 0521796415, p.35, books.google.com
- ^ Lipiński, Edward (2001). Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar. Peeters Publishers. p. 200.
- ^ Richard D. Janda & Brian D. Joseph, "Reconsidering the Canons of Sound-Change: Towards a “Big Bang” Theory", in "Historical Linguistics 2001. Selected Papers from the 15 International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 13–17 August 2001", Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. (2003), pp. 205–219
- ^ "Crimean Tatar-Russian as a Reflection of Crimean Tatar National Identity", iccrimea.org
- JSTOR 2914173.
Sources
- Andrei A. Avram, "On the Status of Prothetic Vowels in the Atlantic French Creoles" (pdf file), Antwerp Papers in Linguistics, Issue 107 (2004), ua.ac.be