Prosthesis (linguistics)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Prosthesis or prothesis in linguistics and poetry (Greek pro "pre-" + thesis "putting") is the appending of a consonant, a vowel, or a whole syllable in front of a word, usually to facilitate pronunciation. It is a form of metaplasm.

The opposite phenomenon is called aphesis.

[edit] Prothesis in word borrowing/derivation

Prothesis may be a form of word corruption during borrowing from foreign languages or during derivation from protolanguages.

For example, /s/ + stop clusters in Latin gained a preceding /e/ in Old Spanish and Old French; hence, the Spanish word for state is estado, deriving from Latin status.

Some Turkic languages avoid certain combinations of consonants at the beginning of a word. In Turkish, for instance, Smyrna is called İzmir, and the French word station becomes Turkish istasyon.

In some dialects of Nenets language, the initial syllable cannot start with a vowel, therefore when borrowing the initial nasal consonant prothesis ng [ŋ] is used.

Hindi borrowing from English words with initial i; sp-, sk- or sm- clusters: school → iskuul, special → ispesal.

When words with a prosthesis occur in Interlingua, they generally drop the prosthesis. Hence, Spanish estado appears in Interlingua as stato; Turkish istasyon becomes station; Hindi iskuul and ispesal become schola and special, respectively. This occurs because the prosthesis is seldom part of the international form of the word.