In linguistics, prothesis, or less commonly prosthesis is the addition of a sound or syllable at the beginning of a word without changing the word's meaning or the rest of its structure. A vowel or consonant added by prothesis is called prothetic or prosthetic. Prothesis is different from the adding of a prefix, which changes the meaning of a word. Prothesis is a metaplasm, a change in spelling or pronunciation. The opposite process, the loss of a sound from the beginning of a word, is called apheresis or aphesis.
A well-known example is that + stop clusters, in Latin, gained a preceding in early Romance languages. Thus, Latin status changed to Spanish and French, "state"/"been", and Latin speciālis changed to Spanish and Old Frenchespecial.
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, borrowed from French, becomes Turkish. Similarly, in Bashkir, a prosthetic vowel is added to Russian loanwords if a consonant or a consonant cluster appears at the beginning: "rye" from Russian, "table" from Russian, "bench" from Russian, etc. However, Bashkir presents cases of novel prothesis in terms that are inherited from Old Turkic: "falcon" from Old Turkiclačïn, "dew" from Old Turkic čïq.
Samoyedic languages
In Nenets, Enets and Nganasan, prothesis of a velar nasal before vowels has occurred historically: the Nenets words "road", "bow" are cognate with Hungarianút, 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.
Hindi
words from English have an initial i before sp-, sk- or sm-: school → iskuul, special → ispesal.
In Persian, loanwords with an initial sp-, st-, sk- or sm- add a short vowele at the beginning: spray → esprey, stadium → estadiun, Stalin → Estalin, skate → eskeyt, scan → eskan etc. Persians learning Polish thus pronounce smacznego as esmacznego.
During the evolution from Proto-Slavic, words in various Slavic languages gained prosthetic consonants: Russian okno vs. Ukrainian vikno or Belarusianvakno. Also, Polish wątroba and Russian utroba changed from Proto-Slavic ǫtroba.
regularly break up initial two-consonant clusters by adding a prothetic vowel. The vowel may be preceded by the glottal stop /ʔ/ or, in Hebrew, /h/, which may be pronounced or simply written. Because of the triconsonantal rootmorphology 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 from the verb kataba. In Hebrew in nouns of Greek origin, such as Aplaton, etztadion.
Consonant mutation
Celtic languages
sometimes features h-prothesis only for vowel-initial words. It occurs in words after ei, ein and eu : oedranei hoedran. It also occurs with ugain following ar in the traditional counting system: un ar hugain "one on twenty".
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 where n never existed. A similar process called intrusive-r occurs in some varieties of English.
Sandhi
A prothetic vowel performs external sandhi in Italian: compare la scuola vs. in iscuola. It is, therefore, conjectured both that the origins of the Romance prothesis are phonetical, rather than grammatical. Prothesis originally brokeconsonant clusters if the preceding word ended in a consonant. There was no prothesis in the Romance dialects that had lost their terminal consonants.
Second language
Phonetic rules of a native language may influence the pronunciation of asecond language, including various metaplasms. For example, prothesis is reported for Crimean Tatars when they speak Russian. James L. Barker writes: "If an Arab, an East Indian, a Frenchman, Spaniard, or Italian is given the following sentence to read: I want to speak Spanish, he reads it in the following manner: I want to speak /Spanish. In this case there is no 'parasitic' i or e before sp of speak, but there is before sp in Spanish".
