Prothesis (linguistics)

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).[7]

Thus, Latin status changed to Spanish estado and French état, été (in which the s was later lost) "state"/"been", and Latin speciālis changed to Spanish and Old French especial (Modern French spécial and Italian speciale).

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 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, өҫтәл "table" from Russian стол, эскәмйә "bench" from Russian скамья, etc.

However, Bashkir presents cases of novel prothesis in terms that are inherited from Old Turkic: ыласын "falcon" from Old Turkic lačïn, ысыҡ "dew" from Old Turkic čïq.

In Nenets, Enets and Nganasan, prothesis of a velar nasal [ŋ] before vowels has occurred historically: the Nenets words /ŋuːʔ/ "road", /ŋin/ "bow" are cognate with Hungarian út, íj with the same meaning.

In some varieties of Nenets, the rule remains productive: the initial syllable cannot start with a vowel, and vowel-initial loanwords are adapted with prothetic /ŋ/.

Hindi words from English have an initial i before sp-, sk- or sm-: school → iskuul, special → ispesal. stop → istahp

In Persian, loanwords with an initial sp-, st-, sk- or sm- add a short vowel e at the beginning: spray → esprey, stadium → estadiun, Stalin → Estalin, skate → eskeyt, scan → eskan etc.

During the evolution from Proto-Slavic, words in various Slavic languages gained prosthetic consonants: Russian okno ("window") vs. Ukrainian vikno or Belarusian vakno.

Also, Polish wątroba ("liver") and Russian utroba ("womb", "entrails") changed from Proto-Slavic ǫtroba.[8]

Semitic languages regularly break up initial two-consonant clusters by adding a prothetic vowel. The vowel may be preceded by the glottal stop /ʔ/ (see aleph) or, in Hebrew, /h/, which may be pronounced or simply written.[9] Because of the triconsonantal root morphology of Semitic languages, the prosthetic vowel may appear regularly when the first two consonants of the root lack an intermediate vowel, such as in verb conjugation; Arabic ʼaktubu (I write) from the verb kataba (root ktb). In Hebrew in nouns of Greek origin, such as Aplaton (Plato), etztadion ("stadium").

Welsh sometimes features h-prothesis only for vowel-initial words. It occurs in words after ei (her), ein (our) and eu (their): oedran (age) ei hoedran (her age). It also occurs with ugain (twenty) following ar (on) in the traditional counting system: un ar hugain "one on twenty" (twenty-one).

Swiss German features n-prothesis if a word ends with a vowel and the next word begins with a vowel. A dropped final n was originally retained then, but the process now occurs in contexts in which n never existed. A similar process called intrusive-r occurs in some varieties of English.