Metathesis (linguistics)


Metathesis is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence. Most commonly, it refers to the interchange of two or more contiguous sounds, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:
Metathesis may also involve interchanging non-contiguous sounds, known as nonadjacent metathesis, long-distance metathesis, or hyperthesis, as shown in these examples of metathesis sound change from Latin to Spanish:
Many languages have words that show this phenomenon, and some even use it as a regular part of their grammar, such as Hebrew and Fur. The process of metathesis has altered the shape of many familiar words in English as well.
The original form before metathesis may be deduced from older forms of words in the language's lexicon or, if no forms are preserved, from phonological reconstruction. In some cases it is not possible to settle with certainty on the original version.

Rhetorical metathesis

was a historian and scholar in rhetoric living in 1st century BC Greece. He analysed classical texts and applied several revisions to make them sound more eloquent. One of the methods he used was re-writing documents on a mainly grammatical level: changing word and sentence orders would make texts more fluent and 'natural', he suggested. He called this way of re-writing metathesis.

Examples

English

Metathesis is responsible for some common speech errors, such as children acquiring spaghetti as pasketti. The pronunciation for ask is now considered standard, and the spelling "ask" was used by Shakespeare and in the King James Bible. Chaucer, Caxton, and the Coverdale Bible, however, use "ax". The word "ask" derives from Proto-Germanic *aiskona.
Some other frequent English pronunciations that display metathesis are:
The process has shaped many English words historically. Bird and horse came from Old English and hros; wasp and hasp were also written wæps and hæps.
The Old English "bright" underwent metathesis to bryht, which became Modern English.
The Old English "three" formed "thrid" and þrēotene "thriteen". These underwent metathesis to forms which became Modern English and.
The Old English verb "to work" had the passive participle "worked". This underwent metathesis to wroht, which became Modern English.
The Old English "hole" underwent metathesis to þryl. This gave rise to a verb þrylian "pierce", which became Modern English thrill, and formed the compound nosþryl "nose-hole" which became Modern English.
Metathesis is also a common feature of the West Country dialects.

French

Etymological metathesis occurs in the following French words:
Deliberate metathesis also occurs extensively in the informal French pattern of speech called verlan. In verlan new words are created from existing words by reversing the order of syllables. Verlanization is applied mostly to two-syllable words and the new words that are created are typically considerably less formal than the originals, and/or take on a slightly different meaning. The process often involves considerably more changes than simple metathesis of two phonemes but this forms the basis for verlan as a linguistic phenomenon. Some of these words have become part of standard French.
A few well known examples are:
Some Verlan words are metathesized more than once:
showed occasional metathesis when phonemes not conforming to the usual euphonic constraints were joined. This happened, for example, when a clitic pronoun was attached to a verb ending: it is attested that forms like dejadle "leave him" were often metathesized to dejalde. The Spanish name for Algeria is likely a metathesis of the Arabic name for the territory.
Lunfardo, an argot of Spanish from Buenos Aires, is fond of vesre, metathesis of syllables. The word vesre itself is an example:
Gacería, an argot of Castile, incorporates metathesized words:
Some frequently heard pronunciations in Spanish display metathesis:
In Greek, the present stem often consists of the root with a suffix of y. If the root ends in the vowel a or o, and the consonant n or r, the y exchanges position with the consonant and is written i:
For metathesis of vowel length, which occurs frequently in Attic and Ionic Greek, see quantitative metathesis.

Danish

Some common mispronunciations of Danish words employ metathesis:
But metathesis has also historically changed some words:
Metathesis of liquid consonants is an important historical change during the development of the Slavic languages: a syllable-final liquid metathesized to become syllable-initial, therefore e.g. Polish vs. English.
A number of Proto-Indo-European roots indicate metathesis in Slavic forms when compared with other Indo-European languages:
Other roots have diverged within the Slavic family:
In western dialects of Finnish, historical stem-final /h/ has been subject to metathesis. That leads to variant word forms:
Some words have been standardized in the metathetized form:
Sporadic examples include the word "green", which derives from older, and the vernacular change of the word "jovial" to .

Hungarian

In case of a narrow range of Hungarian nouns, metathesis of a h sound and a liquid consonant occurs in nominative case, but the original form is preserved in accusative and other suffixed forms:
The other instances are villus/fluff/fuzz/nap vs. bolyhok, vs. molyhos down/pubescence , and the obsolete animal's fetus. The first of them is often used in the regular form.

Egyptian Arabic

A common example of metathesis in Egyptian Arabic is when the order of the word's root consonants has changed.
The following examples of metathesis have been identified in Egyptian Arabic texts, but are not necessarily more common than their etymological spellings:
The following loanwords are also sometimes found with metathesis:
The likely cause for metathesis in the word "hospital" is that the result resembles a common word pattern familiar to Arabic speakers.
Perhaps the clearest example of metathesis in Egyptian Arabic is the modern name of the city of Alexandria: Iskandariya. In addition to the metathesis of x /ks/ to /sk/, the initial Al of Alexandria has been reanalyzed as the Arabic definite article.

Hebrew

In Hebrew the verb conjugation hitpaēl undergoes metathesis if the first consonant of the root is an alveolar or postalveolar fricative. Namely, the pattern hiṯ1a22ē3 becomes hi1ta22ē3. Examples:
Hebrew also features isolated historical examples of metathesis. For example, the words כֶּֽבֶשׂ keves and כֶּֽשֶׂב kesev both appear in the Torah.

Amharic

Amharic has a few minor patterns of metathesis, as shown by Wolf Leslau. For example, "matches" is sometimes pronounced as, "nanny" is sometimes pronounced as. The word 'Monday" is, which is the base for "Tuesday", which is often metathesized as. All of these examples show a pair of consonants reversed so that the stop begins the next syllable.

Japanese

Small children commonly refer to kusuri "medicine" as sukuri.
arata- "new" contrasts with atarashii "new".
The following are examples of argot used in the entertainment industry.
In Navajo, verbs have morphemes prefixed onto the verb stem. These prefixes are added to the verb stem in a set order in a prefix positional template. Although prefixes are generally found in a specific position, some prefixes change order by the process of metathesis.
For example, prefix usually occurs before, as in
However, when occurs with the prefixes and, the metathesizes with, leading to an order of + +, as in
instead of the expected * .

Lakota

The Rotuman language of Rotuman Island uses metathesis as a part of normal grammatical structure by inverting the ultimate vowel with the immediately preceding consonant.

SENĆOŦEN

In SENĆOŦEN metathesis is used as a grammatical device to indicate "actual" aspect. The actual aspect is most often translated into English as a be... -ing progressive. The actual aspect is derived from the "nonactual" verb form by a CV → VC metathetic process.
See Montler, Thompson & Thompson for more information.

Telugu

From a comparative study of Dravidian vocabularies, one can observe that the retroflex consonants and the liquids of the alveolar series do not occur initially in common Dravidian etyma, but Telugu has words with these consonants at the initial position. It was shown that the etyma underwent a metathesis in Telugu, when the root word originally consisted of an initial vowel followed by one of the above consonants. When this pattern is followed by a consonantal derivative, metathesis has occurred in the phonemes of the root-syllable with the doubling of the suffix consonant ; when a vowel derivative follows, metathesis has occurred in the phonemes of the root syllable attended by a contraction of the vowels of root and suffix syllables. These statements and the resulting sequences of vowel contraction may be summed up as follows:
Type 1: V1C1-C² > C1V1-C²C²
Type 2: V1C1-V²- > C1V1-
Examples:
Two types of metathesis are observed in Turkish. The examples given are from Anatolian Turkish, though the closely related Azerbaijani language is better known for its metathesis:
Like many other natural languages Urdu and Hindi also have metathesis like in this diachronic example:
Sanskrit janma > Urdu جنم and Hindi janam "Birth"

American Sign Language

In ASL, several signs which have a pre-specified initial and final location can have the order of these two locations reversed in contexts which seem to be purely phonological. While not possible with all signs, this does happen with quite a few. For example, the sign DEAF, prototypically made with the '1' handshape making contact first with the cheek and then moving to contact the jaw, can have these locations reversed if the preceding sign, when part of the same constituent, has a final location more proximal to the jaw. Both forms of the sign DEAF are acceptable to native signers. A proposed prerequisite for metathesis to apply in ASL is that both signs must be within the same region on the body. Constraints on the applications of metathesis in ASL has led to discussions that the phonology breaks down the body into regions distinct from settings.

In popular culture