Sandhi
| Sound change and alternation |
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| Fortition |
| Dissimilation |
Sandhi (Sanskrit: संधिः sandhí[1] "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries (thus belonging to morphophonology). Examples include the fusion of sound across word boundaries, as its name implies, and the alteration of sounds from nearby sounds or the grammatical function of adjacent words.
Sandhi occurs particularly prominently in the phonology of Indian languages (especially Sanskrit, Telugu Marathi, Hindi, Pali, Kannada, Bengali). However, it exists in many other languages, such as in some North Germanic languages.
Types
Sandhi can be either internal, within words at morpheme boundaries, as (syn- + pathy); or external, at word boundaries, such as in the pronunciation tem books for ten books in some dialects of English. The linking /r/ of some dialects of English is a kind of external sandhi, as is the process called liaison in French and raddoppiamento fonosintattico in Italian, a process known in English as syntactic gemination.
It may be extremely common in speech, but sandhi (especially external) is typically ignored in spelling, as is the case in English, except for the distinction between a and an. Sandhi is, however, reflected in the orthography of Sanskrit, Telugu, Marathi, Pali and some other Indian languages, as with in Italian in the case of compound words with lexicalized syntactic gemination.
In Japanese phonology, sandhi is primarily exhibited in rendaku (consonant mutation from unvoiced to voiced when not word-initial, in some contexts) and conversion of つ or く (tsu, ku) to a geminate consonant (orthographically, the sokuon っ), both of which are reflected in spelling – indeed, っ symbol for gemination is morphosyntactically derived from つ, and voicing is indicated by adding two dots as in か／が ka, ga, making the relation clear. It also occurs much less often in renjō (連声), where, most commonly, a terminal /n/ on one morpheme results in an /n/ (or /m/) being added to the start of the next morpheme, as in 天皇: てん ＋ おう → てんのう (ten + ō = tennō); that is also shown in the spelling (the kanji do not change, but the kana, which specify pronunciation, change).
External sandhi effects can sometimes become morphologized (apply only in certain morphological and syntactic environments) like in Tamil[2][3] and, over time, turn into consonant mutations.
Most tonal languages have tone sandhi in which the tones of words alter according to certain rules. An example is the behavior of tone 3 in Mandarin Chinese. When in isolation, tone 3 is often pronounced as a falling-rising tone. When a tone 3 occurs before another tone 3, however, it changes into tone 2 (a rising tone), and when it occurs before any of the other tones, it is pronounced as a low falling tone, with no rise at the end. A simple example occurs in the common greeting 你好 nǐ hǎo (with two words containing underlying tone 3), normally pronounced ní hǎo.
See also
References
- ↑ The pronunciation of the word "sandhi" is rather diverse among English speakers. In Sanskrit it is pronounced [sən̪d̪ʱi]. English pronunciations include /ˈsʌndi/ (identical with "Sunday" for some speakers), /ˈsændi/ (like the first name "Sandy"), and /ˈsɑːndi/.
- ↑ Schiffman, Harold F. (1999). A Reference Grammar of Spoken Tamil. Cambridge University Press. p. 20.
- ↑ Hemalatha Nagarajan. "Gemination of stops in Tamil: implications for the phonology-syntax interface" (PDF).
External links
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Look up sandhi in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |