Fusion (phonetics).html |
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| Historical sound change |
|---|
| General |
| Metathesis |
| Dissimilation |
| Fortition |
| Lenition (weakening) |
| Sonorization (voicing) |
| Spirantization (assibilation) |
| Rhotacism (change of [z] to [r]) |
| L-vocalization (change of [l] to [w]) |
| Debuccalization (loss of place) |
| Elision (loss) |
| Apheresis (initial) |
| Syncope (medial) |
| Apocope (final) |
| Haplology (similar syllables) |
| Fusion |
| Cluster reduction |
| Compensatory lengthening |
| Epenthesis (addition) |
| Anaptyxis (vowel) |
| Excrescence (consonant) |
| Prosthesis (initial) |
| Paragoge (final) |
| Unpacking |
| Vowel breaking |
| Assimilation |
| Coarticulation |
| Palatalization (before front vowels) |
| Velarization (before back vowels) |
| Labialization (before rounded vowels) |
| Initial voicing (before a vowel) |
| Final devoicing (before silence) |
| Vowel harmony |
| Consonant harmony |
| Cheshirisation (trace remains) |
| Nasalization |
| Tonogenesis |
| Floating tone |
| Sandhi (boundary change) |
| Crasis (contraction) |
| Liaison, linking R |
| Consonant mutation |
| Tone sandhi |
| Hiatus |
In phonetics and historical linguistics, fusion is the merger of the features of two segment into one.
A common form of fusion is found in the development of nasal vowels, which frequently become phonemic when final nasal consonants are lost from a language. This occurred in French and Portuguese. Compare the French words un vin blanc [œ̃ vɛ̃ blɑ̃] "a white wine" with their English cognates, one, vine, blank, which retain the n's.
Another example is the development of Greek bous "cow" from Indo-European *gwous. Although *gw was already a single consonant, [ɡʷ], it had two places of articulation, a velar stop ([ɡ]) and labial secondary articulation ([ʷ]). In Greek bous these elements have fused into a purely labial stop [b].
An extreme example of fusion occurred in Old Irish, where a vowel fused with a consonant before another consonant. The only feature that remained of the lost consonant was its length, in the form of a long vowel: *[magl] → [maːl] "prince". This phenomenon is called compensatory lengthening.
See also
The opposite of fusion is unpacking.
References
- Crowley, Terry. (1997) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3rd edition. Oxford University Press.
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