Epenthesis

[bnjtokyo]

If the good doctor wishes to extend his discussion of linguistic techical terms, may I suggest he consider "epenthesis," defined as "the insertion of a vowel or consonant into a word to make its pronunciation easier." Examples abound such as "[the] development of Middle English thunder from Old English thunor." The etymology is "Late Latin, from Greek, from epentithenai, to insert : ep-, epi-, epi- + en- . . . + tithenai, to place; see [PIE] dhē-" (example and etymology from the American Heritage Dictionary)

It is extremely common in Japanese when it adapts loan words to its phonology: English "hotel" becomes "hoteru" where an /e/ is inserted to break up the /tr/consonant cluster and a /u/ has been added at the end to maintain the CV structure of the language.

I would also like to encourage Dr Goodword to add an essay on this phenomenon to his course in Linguistics spread around the site.

I was reminded of the term when I discovered speculation that the phoneme /r/ in Japanese developed in inter vocalic environments because Old Japanese, a consonant - vowel language, found V-V sequences difficult to articulate. The fact that no pure Japanese words begin with /r/ was offered as evidence for this hypothesis. (NB Modern Japanese has lots of words that begin with /r/, but they are all loan words from Chinese or other languages.)

And then there is the whole can of worms surrounding the rhotic/non-rhotic dialects of English that add [r] epenthetically in some environments and delete it in others.

[Slava]

One that got me a while back was how medical professionals could not correctly pronounce the name of the drug I was on: vancomycin. They always put an 'a' in after the 'y'. One was even quite surprised to see the spelling of the word when I pointed it out. Almost no one can pronounce metoprol or dorzolomide, either.