Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The insertion of a sound in the middle of a word, as in Middle English thunder from Old English thunor.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In grammar, the insertion of a letter or syllable in the middle of a word, as alituum for alitum.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Gram.) The insertion of a letter or a sound in the body of a word.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun phonetics, prosody The
insertion of aphoneme ,letter , orsyllable into aword , usually to satisfy thephonological constraints of a language or poetic context.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the insertion of a vowel or consonant into a word to make its pronunciation easier
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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I notice that Mongolian also has a similar process of left-to-right schwa epenthesis however this seems to occur to resolve clustering in the coda not the onset.
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I notice that Mongolian also has a similar process of left-to-right schwa epenthesis however this seems to occur to resolve clustering in the coda not the onset.
Archive 2008-07-01 2008
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This epenthesis is seen elsewhere, as in Herecele where its Greek origin emphasizes that this phonetic process did indeed happen.
Archive 2008-04-01 2008
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So... we see that offending verbs like these did not survive intact and yet were not resolved by metathesis or epenthesis.
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So ideally you want to find a noun with a-epenthesis that will correspond in root with a verb, and see what happens?
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In other words, epenthesis is likely to be unnecessary.
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This epenthesis is seen elsewhere, as in Herecele where its Greek origin emphasizes that this phonetic process did indeed happen.
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Unlike a totally unproven epenthesis, rules concerning sonorancy prove its absence in at least one case.
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I might also be interested to find out that vowel insertion is widespread enough in the world's languages to have a name, epenthesis also called anaptyxis.
Archive 2007-05-01 David Wharton 2007
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Maybe I could observe that epenthesis happens as a rule in English plural formations when the singular form of a word ends in an "s" sound; thus the plural of kiss is not kiss-s but kisses.
Archive 2007-05-01 David Wharton 2007
fbharjo commented on the word epenthesis
an added put
July 25, 2007