Sandhi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sandhi (Sanskrit: संधि, "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries (thus belonging to what is called morphophonology). Examples include the fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of sounds due to neighboring sounds or due to the grammatical function of adjacent words. It occurs particularly prominently in Sanskrit phonology, hence its naming with a word from that language, but most languages have it.
As a non-English word, the pronunciation of the word “sandhi” is rather diverse among English speakers. According to Sanskrit phonology it can be pronounced /sən̪d̪ʰi/. Acceptable English pronunciations include /ˈsʌndi/, /ˈsændi/, and /ˈsɑndi/ among others.
[edit] Types of sandhi
- Internal sandhi features the alteration of sounds within words at morpheme boundaries, as in sympathy (syn- + pathy).
- External sandhi refers to changes found at word boundaries, such as in the pronunciation [tɛm bʊks] for ten books. The Linking R of some dialects of English is a kind of external sandhi, as is the process called liaison in the French language.
While it may be extremely common in speech, sandhi (especially external) is typically ignored in spelling, as is the case in English, with the exception of the distinction between "a" and "an" (sandhi is, however, reflected in the writing system of Sanskrit). External sandhi effects can sometimes become morphologized (i.e. apply only in certain morphological and syntactic environments) and, over time, turn into consonant mutations.
Most tonal languages have tone sandhi, in which the tones of words alter in complicated ways. For example: Mandarin has four tones: a high monotone, a rising tone, a falling-rising tone, and a falling tone. In the common greeting nǐ hǎo, both words would normally have the falling rising tone. However, this is difficult to say, so the tone on nǐ mutates into ní, although by orthographical rules the tone as written in Hanyu Pinyin does not change.
