Epenthesis

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In poetry and phonetics, epenthesis (Greek epi "on" + en "in" + thesis "putting") is the insertion of a consonant, a vowel, or a whole syllable into a word, usually to facilitate pronunciation. The deletion of a sound is called elision.

In songs and poetry, epenthesis is often used to make words conform to the meter. An example in an English song is "The Umbrella Man", where the meter requires "umbrella" to be pronounced with four syllables, um-buh-rel-la, so that "any umbrellas" has the meter ány úmberéllas.

In linguistics, epenthesis generally breaks up a consonant cluster or vowel sequence that is not permitted by the phonotactics of a language.

Regular or semiregular epenthesis commonly occurs in languages which use affixes. For example, a schwa /ə/ (or in RP an /ɪ/) is inserted before the English plural suffix -/z/ and the past tense suffix -/d/ when the root ends in a similar consonant: glass → glasses /glæsəz/ or /glɑːsəz/ or /glɑːsɪz/ and bat → batted /bætəd/ or /bætɪd/.

(An alternate view is that the root form of these suffixes is /əz/ and /əd/ respectively, and that the /ə/ undergoes elision in most cases.)

Epenthesis most often occurs within unfamiliar or complex consonant clusters. For example, the name Duane is commonly pronounced with an epenthetic schwa between the /d/ and the /w/, and many speakers insert schwa between the /l/ and /t/ of realtor. The word hamster is often pronounced with a /p/ after the /m/.

In English, epenthesis is sometimes used for humorous or childlike effect. For example, the cartoon character Yogi Bear says "pic-a-nic basket" for picnic basket, and Homer Simpson says "saxo-ma-phone" for saxophone. (The latter could be said to be an infix which is used to make a word "sophisticated" — Another example is to be found in the chants of England football fans in which England is usually rendered as [ˈɪŋgəlænd].

In German, which readily forms new words agglutinatively, epenthetic letters are commonplace to enable the words to sound euphonic. In French, the letter "t" is inserted in inverted interrogative phrases between a verb ending in a vowel and a pronoun beginning with a vowel, such as in "y a-t-il" (meaning "is there...?"). Similarly, the English language adds a "t" in certain circumstances, for example, to distinguish an "l" from an "r", as in "deviltry". It's permissible to say "devilry", but this apparently takes a rare precision of speech.

Contents

1 Epenthetic vowels

1.1 Finnish

2 Related phenomena
3 See also
4 Reference
5 External link

Epenthetic vowels

Vocalic epenthesis typically occurs when words are borrowed from a language that has consonant clusters or syllable codas that are not permitted in the borrowing language, though this is not always the cause.

Languages use various vowels for this purpose, though schwa is quite common when it is available. For example,

Hebrew uses a single vowel, the schwa.
Japanese uses /u/ except following /t/ and /d/, when it uses /o/, and after /h/, when it uses an echo vowel. For example, the English word street becomes /sutorito/ in Japanese; the Dutch name Gogh becomes /gohho/, and the German nameBach, /bahha/.
Korean uses <ㅡ> /ɯ/, except when borrowing [ʃ], which takes a following <ㅣ> /i/ if the consonant is at the end of the word, or <ㅠ> /ju/ otherwise.
Colloquial Brazilian Portuguese uses /i/ between all consonantal clusters, except those formed by /l/ (atleta) or /r/ (prato). Words like psicologia and advogado are pronounced as ‘pissicologia’ or 'adivogado'. Some regional dialects use /e/ instead of /i/ for voiced consonantal clusters (then advogado becomes adevogado).

Finnish

In Finnish, there are two epenthetic vowels and two nativization vowels. One epenthetic vowel is the preceding vowel, found in the illative case ending -(h)*n, e.g. maahan, taloon. (There is no schwa in Finnish; the term "schwa" is often confused with the epenthetic vowel.) The second one is [e], connecting stems that have historically been consonant stems to their case endings, e.g. nim+n → nimen.

In standard Finnish, consonant clusters may not be broken by epenthetic vowels; foreign words undergo consonant deletion rather than addition of vowels. However, modern loans may not end in consonants. Even if the word, such as a personal name, is not loaned, a paragogic vowel is needed to connect a consonantal case ending to the word. The older vowel, not in use anymore, is /a/ (front or back), e.g. strand → ranta. ‹ä› /æ/, the fronted counterpart of /a/, is not encountered, although it would be expected from vowel harmony for the neutral vowels /i/ and /e/. For example, penkka ← Swedish bänk. The modern vowel is /i/, e.g. (Inter)net → netti, or in the case of personal name, Bush + -sta → Bushista "from Bush".

Finnish has moraic consonants, of which L, H and N are of interest in this case. In standard Finnish, these are slightly intensified when preceding a consonant in a medial cluster, e.g. -hj-. Some dialects, like Savo and Ostrobothnian, employ epenthesis instead, using the preceding vowel in clusters of type -lC- and -hC-, and in Savo, -nh-. For example, Pohjanmaa "Ostrobothnia" → Pohojammaa, ryhmä → ryhymä, and Savo vanha → vanaha. Ambiguities may result: salmi "strait" vs. salami. (An exception is that in Pohjanmaa, -lj- and -rj- become -li- and -ri-, respectively, e.g. kirja → kiria. Also, in a small region in Savo, the vowel /e/ is used in the same role.)

Related phenomena

Prothesis is the addition of a sound to the start of a word.
Paragoge is the addition of a sound to the end of a word.
Infixation is the insertion of a morpheme within a word.
Tmesis is the inclusion of a whole word within another one.
Metathesis is the reordering of sounds within a word.

Reference

[Välivokaali]

External link

[Definition at BYU]