In linguistics, prothesis (/ˈprɒθəsɪs/; from post-classical Latin based on Ancient Greek πρόθεσις próthesis 'placing before'), or less commonly prosthesis (from Ancient Greek πρόσθεσις prósthesis 'addition') is the addition of a sound or syllable at the beginning of a word without changing the word's meaning or the rest of its structure. A vowel or consonant added by prosthesis is called prothetic or prosthetic.
Contents
- Word formation
- Romance languages
- Turkic languages
- Samoyedic languages
- Hindi
- Persian
- Slavic languages
- Semitic Languages
- Celtic languages
- Swiss German
- Sandhi
- Second language
- References
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 be a way of word formation during borrowing from foreign languages or during derivation from protolanguages.
Romance languages
A well-known example is that /s/ + stop clusters (known as s impurum), in Latin, gained a preceding /e/ in early Romance languages (Old Spanish, Old French).
Thus, Latin status changed to Spanish estado and French état/été (in which the s was lost) "state"/"been", and Latin speciālis changed to Spanish and Old French especial (Modern French spécial, and English special).
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 the 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 "id.", өҫтәл "table" from Russian стол "id.", эскәмйә "bench" from Russian скамья "id.", etc.
More interestingly, however, Bashkir presents cases of novel prothesis in terms inherited from Common Turkic: ыласын "falcon" from Old Turkic lačïn "id.", ыcыҡ "dew" from Old Turkic čïq "id."
Samoyedic languages
In the Samoyedic languages Nenets, Enets and Nganasan, a prothesis of a velar nasal [ŋ] before vowels has occurred historically: the Nenets words /ŋuːʔ/ "road", /ŋin/ "bow" are cognate with Hungarian út, íj, of the same meaning.
In some varieties of Nenets, this rule remains productive: the initial syllable cannot start with a vowel, and vowel-initial loanwords are adapted with prothetic /ŋ/.
Hindi
Hindi words from English have an initial i; sp-, sk- or sm- clusters: school → iskuul, special → ispesal.
Persian
In Persian loan words with initial sp-, st-, sk- or sm- clusters, a short vowel e is added in the beginning: spray→esprey, stadium →estadiun, Stalin → Estalin, skate→eskeyt, scan→eskan etc.
Persians learning Polish pronounce the smacznego (bon appétit) as esmacznego.
Slavic languages
During the evolution from Proto-Slavic, words in various Slavic languages gained pro(s)thetic consonants: Russian okno ("window") vs. Ukrainian vikno or Belarusian vakno.
Also, Polish wątroba ("liver"), from Proto-Slavic ǫtroba, compares with Russian utroba).
Semitic Languages
Semitic languages regularly break up initial two-consonant clusters by adding a prosthetic vowel. This vowel may be preceded by the glottal stop /ʔ/ (see aleph) or (in Hebrew) /h/, which may be pronounced or simply written. Because of the triconsonantal root morphology of Semitic languages, this prosthetic vowel may appear regularly when the first two consonants of the root lack an intermediate vowel, for example due to verb conjugation as in Arabic ʼaktubu (I write) from the verb kataba (root ktb).
Celtic languages
Welsh sometimes features h-prothesis and only affects vowel-initial words. H-prothesis occurs in words following the words ei (her), ein (our) and eu (their), e.g. oedran (age) ei hoedran (her age). It also occurs with ugain (twenty) following ar (on) in the traditional counting system, e.g. un ar hugain "one on twenty" (twenty-one).
Swiss German
Swiss German features n-prothesis when one word ends on a vowel and the next word begins with a vowel. Historically this derives from dropped final n that has been retained in these contexts, but now it also occurs in contexts where there was no n previously.
Sandhi
Examples of a pro(s)thetic vowel performing external sandhi are known such as 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, and that initially, prothesis was for breaking consonant clusters with the preceding word ending in consonant. The hypothesis is corroborated by the absence of prothesis in Romance dialects that had lost their terminal consonants.
Second language
Phonetic rules of the native language may influence pronunciation of a second language, including various metaplasms. For example, prothesis is reported for Crimean Tatars speaking Russian language.
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".