Consonant mutation is change in a
consonant in a
word according to its
morphological or
syntactic
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), ...
environment.
Mutation occurs in languages around the world. A prototypical example of consonant mutation is the initial consonant mutation of all modern
Celtic languages. Initial consonant mutation is also found in
Indonesian or
Malay
Malay may refer to:
Languages
* Malay language or Bahasa Melayu, a major Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore
** History of the Malay language, the Malay language from the 4th to the 14th century
** Indonesi ...
, in
Nivkh
Nivkh or Amuric or Gilyak may refer to:
* Nivkh people
The Nivkh, or Gilyak (also Nivkhs or Nivkhi, or Gilyaks; ethnonym: Нивхгу, ''Nʼivxgu'' (Amur) or Ниғвңгун, ''Nʼiɣvŋgun'' (E. Sakhalin) "the people"), are an indigenous et ...
, in
Southern Paiute
The Southern Paiute people are a tribe of Native Americans who have lived in the Colorado River basin of southern Nevada, northern Arizona, and southern Utah. Bands of Southern Paiute live in scattered locations throughout this territory and ha ...
and in several
West African languages such as
Fula. The
Nilotic language Dholuo
The Dholuo dialect (pronounced ) or ''Nilotic Kavirondo'', is a dialect of the Luo group of Nilotic languages, spoken by about 4.2 million Luo people of Kenya and Tanzania, who occupy parts of the eastern shore of Lake Victoria and areas to the ...
, spoken in
Kenya, shows mutation of stem-final consonants, as does
English to a small extent. Mutation of initial, medial and final consonants is found in
Modern Hebrew. Also,
Japanese exhibits word medial consonant mutation involving voicing, ''
rendaku'', in many compounds.
Uralic languages like
Finnish show
consonant gradation, a type of consonant mutation.
Similar sound changes
Initial consonant mutation must not be confused with
sandhi, which can refer to word-initial alternations triggered by their
phonological environment, unlike mutations, which are triggered by their
morphosyntactic environment. Some examples of word-initial sandhi are listed below.
*
Spanish: , occurring after
nasals and pause, alternate with , occurring after
vowels and
liquid consonants. Example: un
''brco 'a boat', mi
''βrco 'my boat'. This also occurs in
Hebrew (as
begedkefet, an
acronym for the consonants this affects),
Aramaic, and
Tamil.
*Scottish Gaelic: in some dialects, stops in stressed syllables are voiced after nasals, e.g. cat 'a cat', an cat 'the cat'.
Sandhi effects like these (or other phonological processes) are usually the historical origin of morphosyntactically triggered mutation. For example, English fricative mutation (specifically, voicing) in words such as ''house''
aus plural ''houses''
auzɪzand ''house'' (verb)
auzoriginates in an
allophonic alternation of
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
, where a voiced fricative occurred between vowels (or before voiced consonants), and a voiceless one occurred initially or finally, and also when adjacent to voiceless consonants. Old English infinitives ended in ''-(i)an'' and plural nouns (of Class One nouns) ended in ''-as''. Thus, ''hūs'' 'a house' had , and ''hūsian'' 'house (verb)' had ; however, the plural of ''hūs'' was ''hūs'', being a neuter noun of the strong a-stem class. During the Middle English period, ''hous''~''hus'', as part of the loss of gender and erosion of endings, developed plural variation, retaining ''hous''
u:s the dative plural ''housen''
u:zən which became extended to a general plural, and over time taking on the ''es'' plural from Old English Class 1 nouns, thus ''houses''
u:zəz After most endings were lost in English, and the contrast between voiced and voiceless fricatives partly phonemicized (largely due to the influx of
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
loanwords), the alternation was morphologized.
Examples
English
In Old English, velar stops were
palatalized in certain cases but not others. That resulted in some alternations, many of which have been
levelled, but traces occur in some word doublets such as ''ditch'' and ''dike'' .
In the past tense of certain verbs, English also retains traces of several ancient sound developments such as *kt > *xt and *ŋx > *x; many of them have been further complicated by the loss of in the Middle English.
* ''seek'' : ''sought''
* ''think'' : ''thought''
The pair ''teach'' : ''taught'' has a combination of both this and palatalization.
A second palatalization, called
yod-coalescence, occurs in loanwords from
Latin. One subtype affects the
sibilant consonants: earlier and were palatalized, leading to an alternation between alveolar and postalveolar .
* ''confess'' : ''confession''
* ''fuse'' : ''fusion''
Another unproductive layer results from the Vulgar Latin palatalization of velar stops before front vowels. It is thus imported from the Romance languages, and alternate with .
* ''induce'' : ''induction''
* ''magic'' : ''magus''
A combination of inherited and loaned alternation also occurs: an alternation pattern *t : *sj was brought over in Latinate loanwords, which in English was then turned into an alternation between and .
* ''act'' : ''action''
Celtic languages
The
Celtic languages are well-known for their initial consonant mutations. The individual languages vary on the number of mutations available:
Scottish Gaelic has one,
Irish and
Manx
Manx (; formerly sometimes spelled Manks) is an adjective (and derived noun) describing things or people related to the Isle of Man:
* Manx people
**Manx surnames
* Isle of Man
It may also refer to:
Languages
* Manx language, also known as Manx ...
have two,
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peopl ...
,
Cornish and
Breton
Breton most often refers to:
*anything associated with Brittany, and generally
** Breton people
** Breton language, a Southwestern Brittonic Celtic language of the Indo-European language family, spoken in Brittany
** Breton (horse), a breed
**Ga ...
have four (if mixed mutations are counted). Cornish and Breton have so-called mixed mutations; a trigger causes one mutation to some sounds and another to other sounds. Welsh also has a mixed mutation (triggered by ''na'', ''ni'' and ''oni''). The languages vary on the environments for the mutations, but some generalizations can be made. Those languages all have feminine singular nouns mutated after the definite article, with adjectives mutated after feminine singular nouns. In most of the languages, the
possessive determiner Possessive determiners (from la, possessivus, translit=; grc, κτητικός / ktētikós - en. ktetic
Lallu) are determiners which express possession. Some traditional grammars of English refer to them as possessive adjectives, though they do ...
s trigger various mutations. Here are some examples from Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh:
Older textbooks on Gaelic sometimes refer to the ''c → ch'' mutation as "aspiration", but it is not
aspiration in the sense of the word used by modern phoneticians, and linguists prefer to speak of
lenition here.
Historically, the Celtic initial mutations originated from
progressive assimilation
Assimilation is a sound change in which some phonemes (typically consonants or vowels) change to become more similar to other nearby sounds. A common type of phonological process across languages, assimilation can occur either within a word o ...
and
sandhi phenomena between adjacent words. For example, the mutating effect of the conjunction ''a'' 'and' is from the word once having the form *ak, and the final consonant influenced the following sounds.
Welsh
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peopl ...
has three main classes of initial consonant mutation: ''soft mutation'' ( cy, treiglad meddal); ''nasal mutation'' ( cy, treiglad trwynol); and ''aspirate mutation'', which is sometimes called ''spirant mutation'' ( cy, treiglad llaes). The fourth category is ''mixed mutation'', which calls for a ''aspirate mutation'' if possible but otherwise a ''soft mutation''. The following tables show the range of Welsh mutations with examples. A blank cell indicates that no change occurs.
:
*Soft mutation causes initial to be deleted. For example, "garden" becomes "the garden", and "work" becomes "his work".
:
The mutation ''ts'' → ''j'' corresponds to the ''t'' → ''d'' mutation and reflects a change heard in modern words borrowed from English. Borrowed words like (chips) can often be heard in Wales. 'I'm going to get (some) chips'; 'I have chips'. However, the ''ts'' → ''j'' mutation is not usually included the classic list of Welsh mutations and is rarely taught in formal classes. Nevertheless, it is a part of the colloquial language and is used by native speakers.
= ''h''-prothesis
=
h-''prothesis'' is a phenomenon in Welsh in which a vowel-initial word becomes ''h''-initial. It occurs after the possessive pronouns 'her', 'our', and 'their': 'age', 'her age' (c.f. 'his age'). It also occurs with 'twenty' after 'on' in the traditional counting system: 'twenty-one', literally "one on twenty".
Irish
Irish has two consonant mutations: ''
lenition'' (
�ʃeː.vʲuː and ''eclipsis'' (
�ʊ.ɾˠuː.
= Lenition
=
Lenition () is indicated by an h following the consonant in question or, in some older typefaces and texts, by a dot (◌̇) above the letter that has undergone lenition. The effects of lenition are as follows:
# A stop becomes a fricative.
Voicing is retained, as is
place of articulation except for the
coronals.
#* →
#* →
#* →
#* →
#* →
#* →
#* → ,
#* →
#* →
#* →
#* →
#* →
# becomes or ; becomes .
# and become , but , , , , , and do not mutate.
# and are deleted.
= Eclipsis
=
The following tables show how eclipsis affects the start of words. Eclipsis is symbolised in the orthography by adding a letter, or occasionally two letters, to the start of the word. If the word is to be capitalised, the original first letter is capitalised, not the letter or letters added for eclipsis. An example is the "F" in Ireland's national anthem, ''Amhrán na bhFiann''.
Russian
In
Russian, consonant mutation and
alternations are a very common phenomenon during
word formation,
conjugation and in
comparative adjectives.
The most common classes of mutations are the alternation between
velar and
postalveolar consonants:
* →
* →
* → , as in "quiet" and "quieter"
*Gain or loss of
palatalization
Palatalization may refer to:
*Palatalization (phonetics), the phonetic feature of palatal secondary articulation
*Palatalization (sound change)
Palatalization is a historical-linguistic sound change that results in a palatalized articulation ...
: "
tsar
Tsar ( or ), also spelled ''czar'', ''tzar'', or ''csar'', is a title used by East Slavs, East and South Slavs, South Slavic monarchs. The term is derived from the Latin word ''Caesar (title), caesar'', which was intended to mean "emperor" i ...
" and "of the tsar" (adjective)
Other common mutations are:
* → (or less frequently щ ), →
* → , → , →
* → : плеск → плещет "splash" / "(he) splashes", → : свистеть → свищу "to whistle" / "I whistle"
Hebrew
Modern
Hebrew shows a limited set of mutation alternations, involving
spirantization only. The consonants affected may be stem-initial, stem-medial, or stem-final.
However, in Modern Hebrew, stop and fricative variants of , and are sometimes distinct phonemes:
For a more in depth discussion of this phenomenon, see
Begadkefat.
Japanese
Rendaku, meaning "sequential voicing," is a mutation of the initial consonant of a non-initial component in a
Japanese compound word:
* nigiri + sushi → nigirizushi ("grip (with the hand)" + "sushi" → "hand-shaped
sushi")
* nigori + sake → nigorizake ("muddy" + "rice wine" → "unfiltered
sake")
Uralic languages
Word-medial consonant mutation is found in several
Uralic languages and has the traditional name of
consonant gradation. It is pervasive, especially in the
Samic and
Finnic branches.
Finnish
Consonant gradation involves an alternation in consonants between a strong grade in some forms of a word and a weak grade in others. The strong grade usually appears in the nominative singular of nominals and the infinitive of verbs.
The consonants subject to graduation are the plosives (''p'', ''t'', ''k'') before a vowel, sonorants (''m'', ''n'', ''l'', ''r''), and ''h''. Plosives that are preceded by any other obstruent or followed by any consonant do not undergo gradation.
The gradation of loanwords may include new gradation patterns that are not native to Finnish:
Burmese
Burmese
Burmese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia
* Burmese people
* Burmese language
* Burmese alphabet
* Burmese cuisine
* Burmese culture
Animals
* Burmese cat
* Burmese chicken
* Burmese (hor ...
exhibits consonant mutation, involving voicing in many compound words.
The primary type of consonant mutation is that if two syllables are joined to form a
compound word, the initial consonant of the second syllable becomes
voiced. The shift occurs in these phones:
* →
* →
* →
* →
* →
* →
Examples:
: () + () > ("medicine" + "room" → "clinic")
The second type of consonant mutation occurs when the phoneme after the nasalized final becomes a sound in compound words.
Examples:
:"blouse" ( ''angkyi'') can be pronounced or .
The third type of consonant mutation occurs when phonemes , after the nasalized final , become in compound words:
: () + () > () ("to consult")
: () + () > ("to apologize")
: () + () > ("airplane")
Southern Oceanic languages
Mutation of the initial consonant of verbs is a feature of several languages in the
Southern Oceanic branch of the
Austronesian language family.
Central Vanuatu
Initial consonant mutation occurs in many
Central Vanuatu languages like
Raga
A ''raga'' or ''raag'' (; also ''raaga'' or ''ragam''; ) is a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music akin to a musical mode, melodic mode. The ''rāga'' is a unique and central feature of the classical Indian music tradit ...
:
: ''nan vano'' "I went"
: ''nam bano'' "I go"
Those patterns of mutations probably arose when a nasal prefix, indicating the
realis mood, became combined with the verb's initial consonant. The possible ancestral pattern of mutation and its descendants in some modern Central Vanuatu languages are shown below:
New Caledonia
Initial consonant mutation also serves a grammatical purpose in some
New Caledonian languages. For example,
Iaai uses initial consonant mutation in verbs to distinguish between specific/
definite
In linguistics, definiteness is a semantic feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between referents or senses that are identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and those which are not (indefinite noun phrases). The prototypical d ...
objects and generic/indefinite objects:
Those forms likely derive from an earlier
reduplication
In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.
The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...
of the first syllable in which the interconsonantal vowel was deleted, resulting in a
spirantization of the formerly reduplicated consonant.
Dholuo
The
Dholuo language (one of the
Luo languages) shows alternations between voiced and voiceless states of the final consonant of a noun stem. In the
construct state (the form that means 'hill of', 'stick of', etc.) the voicing of the final consonant is switched from the absolute state. (There are also often
vowel alternations that are independent of consonant mutation.)
* 'hill' (abs.), god (const.)
* 'stick' (abs.), luð (const.)
* 'appearance' (abs.), kit (const.)
* 'bone' (abs.), (const.)
*buk 'book' (abs.), bug (const.)
* 'book' (abs.), (const.)
Fula
Consonant mutation is a prominent feature of the
Fula language
Fula ,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh also known as Fulani or Fulah (, , ; Adlam: , , ), is a Senegambian language spoken by around 30 million people as a set of various dialects in a continuum that stre ...
. The Gombe dialect spoken in
Nigeria, for example, shows mutation triggered by
declension class. The mutation grades are
fortition and
prenasalization:
For example, the stems rim- 'free man' and 'person' have the following forms:
* (class 2), dimo (class 1), ndimon (class 6)
* (class 2), gimɗo (class 1), ŋgimkon (class 6)
Indonesian and Malay
The active form of a multisyllabic verb with an initial
stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...
or
fricative consonant
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
is formed by prefixing the verb stem with ''meN-'' in which ''N'' stands for a
nasal
Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination:
* With reference to the human nose:
** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery
** ...
sharing the same
place of articulation as the initial consonant:
*garuk → menggaruk (= to scratch), hitung → menghitung (= to count),
*beri → memberi (= to give), fitnah → memfitnah (= to accuse falsely),
*cari → mencari (= to search), dapat → mendapat (= to obtain), *jangkau → menjangkau (= to reach)
An initial consonant that is an unvoiced stop or ''s'' is deleted, leaving only the nasal in its place.
*kandung → mengandung (= to contain or to be pregnant),
*putih → memutih (= to turn white),
*satu → menyatu (= to become one / to unite),
*tulis → menulis (= to write).
Applied to verbs starting with a vowel, the nasal is realized as ''ng'' .
Monosyllabic verbs add an
epenthetic vowel before prefixing and produce the prefix ''menge-'':
*bor (= boring tool / drill) → mengebor (= to make a hole with drill).
Verbs starting with a nasal or
approximant consonant
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...
do not add any mutant nasal, only ''me-''.
The colloquial language drops ''me-'' prefix but tends to replace it with nasalization:
*tanya → menanya → nanya
*pikir → memikir → mikir
*merepotkan → ng(e)repotin
Latvian
More information is
available in the Latvian Wikipedia.
Also two consonants can mutate as a group.
Ute
In
Ute
Ute or UTE may refer to:
* Ute (band), an Australian jazz group
* Ute (given name)
* ''Ute'' (sponge), a sponge genus
* Ute (vehicle), an Australian and New Zealand term for certain utility vehicles
* Ute, Iowa, a city in Monona County along ...
, also called Southern Paiute, there are three consonant mutations, which are triggered by different word-stems,
The mutations are
spirantization,
gemination, and
prenasalization:
For example, the absolutive suffix -pi appears in different forms, according to the noun stem to which it is suffixed:
*movi-ppi 'nose'
*sappI-vi 'belly'
*-mpi 'tongue'
See also
*
Lenition
*
Fortition
*
Consonant gradation
*
Rendaku
*
Sonority hierarchy
A sonority hierarchy or sonority scale is a hierarchical ranking of speech sounds (or phones). Sonority is loosely defined as the loudness of speech sounds relative to other sounds of the same pitch, length and stress, therefore sonority is often ...
*
Apophony
*
Elision
In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run toget ...
*
Historical linguistics
References
{{reflist
Further reading
*Grijzenhout, Janet. 2011. 'Consonant Mutation' in Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume and Keren Rice (eds.) ''The Blackwell Companion to Phonology'' (Oxford: Blackwell) III: 1537-1558.
*Zimmer, Stefan
The Celtic Mutations: some typological comparisons A Companion in Linguistics, a Festschrift for Anders Ahlqvist, ed. B. Smelik, R. Hofman, C. Hamans, D. Cram. Nijmegen: de Keltische Draak / Münster: Nodus 2004, 127-140.
Celtic languages
Linguistic morphology
Phonology
Syntax