Metathesis is a
sound changeSound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...
that alters the order of phones in a
wordA word is the smallest free form in a language, in contrast to a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word may consist of only one morpheme , but a single morpheme may not be able to exist as a free form A word is the smallest free form (an item that may be uttered in isolation with...
. The most common instance of metathesis is the reversal of the order of two adjacent phonemes, such as "foilage" for
foliage. Many languages have words that show this phenomenon, and some use it as a regular part of their grammar (e.g. the
Fur languageThe Fur language is the language of the Fur of Darfur in western Sudan. It belongs to the Fur branch of the Nilo-Saharan phylum...
). The process of metathesis has altered the shape of many familiar words in the
English languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
, as well.
Metathesis is a
sound changeSound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...
that alters the order of phones in a
wordA word is the smallest free form in a language, in contrast to a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word may consist of only one morpheme , but a single morpheme may not be able to exist as a free form A word is the smallest free form (an item that may be uttered in isolation with...
. The most common instance of metathesis is the reversal of the order of two adjacent phonemes, such as "foilage" for
foliage. Many languages have words that show this phenomenon, and some use it as a regular part of their grammar (e.g. the
Fur languageThe Fur language is the language of the Fur of Darfur in western Sudan. It belongs to the Fur branch of the Nilo-Saharan phylum...
). The process of metathesis has altered the shape of many familiar words in the
English languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
, as well. The nature of the historical sounds before the occurence of metathesis can be clarified either by studying older forms of the language (its
lexiconIn linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes....
) at hand, or, in case these forms are not attested, it may be deduced via phonological reconstruction.
Rhetorical metathesis
Dionysius of HalicarnassusDionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian and teacher of rhetoric, who flourished during the reign of Caesar Augustus.-Life:...
was a historian and scholar in
rhetoricRhetoric is one of the arts of using language as a means to persuade. Along with grammar and logic or dialectic, rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. From ancient Greece to the late 19th Century, it was a central part of Western education, filling the need to train public...
living in 1st century BC Greece. He analysed classical texts and applied several revisions to make them sound more
eloquentElocutio is the term for the mastery of stylistic elements in Western classical rhetoric and comes from the Latin loqui, "to speak". Although today we associate the word elocution more with eloquent speaking, for the classical rhetorician it connoted "style".It is the third of the five canons of...
. One of the methods he used was re-writing documents on a mainly
grammaticalIn linguistics, grammar is the set of logical and structural rules that govern the composition of sentences, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology,...
level: changing word and sentence orders would make texts more fluent and 'natural', he suggested. He called this way of re-writing
μετάθεσις - metathesis (meaning "transposition" in Greek).
Metathesis in English
Metathesis is responsible for the most common types of
speech errorA speech error is a speech pattern that differs from some standard pattern. Speech errors are common among children, who have yet to refine their speech, and can frequently continue into adulthood. They sometimes lead to embarrassment and betrayal of the speaker's regional or ethnic origins...
s, such as children acquiring
spaghetti as
pasghetti. The pronunciation of
ask as goes back to
Old EnglishOld English , also called Anglo-Saxon, is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary...
days, when
ascian and
axian/acsian were both in use. Some other frequent English pronunciations that display metathesis are:
for
ask (possibly the most common metathesis in African American Vernacular English) for
asteriskAn asterisk is a typographical symbol or glyph. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often pronounce it as star...
for
cavalryCavalry were soldiers or warriors who fought mounted on horseback in combat. Cavalry were historically the second oldest and most mobile of the combat arms...
for
comfortable for
foliageIn botany, a leaf is an above-ground plant organ specialized for photosynthesis. For this purpose, a leaf is typically flat and thin. There is continued debate about whether the flatness of leaves evolved to expose the chloroplasts to more light or to increase the absorption of carbon dioxide. In...
for
introduce for
integralIntegration is an important concept in mathematics which, together with differentiation, forms one of the main operations in calculus. Given a function ƒ of a real variable x and an interval [a, b] of the real line, the definite integralis defined informally...
for
nuclear (though this likely emerged by analogy with words such as "particular," "binocular," etc.; see nucular) for
pretty for
relevant
The process has shaped many English words historically.
Bird in English was once
bryd,
horse was
hros,
wasp is also recorded as
wæps and
hasp,
hæps. The discrepancy between the spelling of
iron and the usual pronunciation is the result of metathesis.
Metathesis is also a common feature of the
West Country dialectsThe West Country dialects and West Country accents are generic terms applied to any of several English dialects and accents used by much of the indigenous population of South West England, the area popularly known as the West Country....
.
Metathesis in Spanish
Old
SpanishSpanish or Castilian is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that originated in northern Spain and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile, evolving into the principal language of government and trade in the Iberian peninsula...
showed occasional metathesis when phonemes not conforming to the usual euphonic constraints were joined. This happened, for example, when a
cliticIn morphology, a clitic is a grammatically independent and phonologically dependent morpheme. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...
pronoun was attached to a verb ending: it is attested that forms like
dejadle "leave [plural] him" were often metathesized to
dejalde (the phoneme cluster /dl/ is not allowed anywhere else in Spanish).
Milagro "miracle" is a metathesized derivation from Latin
miraculum, which also shows typical intervocalic
voicingPhonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, phonation is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the definition used among those who study laryngeal anatomy and physiology...
and
syncopeIn phonology, syncope is the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word; especially, the loss of an unstressed vowel.-Syncope as a historical sound change:...
.
LunfardoLunfardo is an argot of the Spanish language which developed at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century in the lower classes in and around Buenos Aires and Montevideo....
, an
argotArgot is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations...
of Spanish from
Buenos AiresBuenos Aires is the capital, and largest city, of Argentina, currently the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the eastern shore of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
, is fond of
vesreVesre is one of the features of Rioplatense Spanish slang. Natives of Buenos Aires and Uruguay use vesre sparingly in colloquial speaking, and never in formal circumstances...
, a form of intentional metathesis that involves changes in the order of whole syllables as well as individual phonemes (
vesre is the inverted form of
revés "back, backwards").
GaceríaGacería is the name of a slang or argot employed by the trilleros and the briqueros in the village of Cantalejo, in the Spanish province of Segovia...
, an argot of
CastileA former kingdom, Castile gradually merged with its neighbors to become the Crown of Castile and later the Kingdom of Spain with the Crown of Aragon and the Crown of Navarre...
, also incorporates words formed through metathesis (
brica for "criba", for example).
Some frequently heard pronunciations in Spanish that display metathesis are:
- calcamonía for calcomanía
- dentrífico for dentífrico
- cocreta for croqueta
Metathesis in French
Modern
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
makes extensive use of metathesis through a pattern of informal speech called
verlanVerlan is an argot in the French language, featuring inversion of syllables in a word, and is common in slang and youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of transposing syllables of individual words to create slang words...
. In verlan new words are created from existing words by reversing the order of phonemes. Verlanization is applied mostly to two-syllable words and the new words that are created are typically considerably less formal than the originals. The process often involves considerably more changes than simple metathesis of two phonemes but this forms the basis for verlan as a linguistic phenomenon.
A few well known examples are:
- laisse béton for laisse tomber
- téci for cité
- céfran for français
Some words were metathesized more than once:
- rebeu comes from beur which itself comes from arabe
Metathesis in Navajo
In
NavajoNavajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwest United States by the Navajo people...
, verbs have (often multiple) 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
'a- (3i object pronoun) usually occurs before
di-, as in
- adisbąąs 'I'm starting to drive some kind of wheeled vehicle along' [ < 'a- + di- + sh- + ł + -bąąs].
However, when
'a- occurs with the prefixes
di- and
ni-, the
'a- metathesizes with
di-, leading to an order of
di- +
'a- +
ni-, as in
- di'nisbąąs 'I'm in the act of driving some vehicle (into something) & getting stuck' [ < di-'a-ni-sh-ł-bąąs < 'a- + di- + ni- + sh- + ł + -bąąs]
instead of the expected *
adinisbąąs (a-di-ni-sh-ł-bąąs
) (note also that 'a- is reduced to '-).
Metathesis in Straits Saanich
In Straits Saanich metathesis is used as a grammatical device to indicate "actual" aspectIn linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb defines the temporal flow in the described event or state...
. 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 metathesis process (i.e. consonant metathesizes with vowel).
| T̵X̱ÉT 'shove' (nonactual) |
→ |
T̵ÉX̱T 'shoving' (actual) |
| ṮPÉX̱ 'scatter' (nonactual) |
→ |
ṮÉPX̱ 'scattering' (actual) |
| T̸L̵ÉQ 'pinch' (nonactual) |
→ |
T̸ÉL̵Q 'pinching' (actual) |
See Montler (1986), Thompson & Thompson (1969) for more information.
Metathesis in Hebrew
In
HebrewHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered a Jewish language. Hebrew in its modern form is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel while Classical Hebrew has been used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world for over...
the verb conjugation (binyan
) (התפעל) undergoes metathesis if the first consonant of the root is an alveolar or postalveolar fricative. Namely, the pattern (where the numbers signify the root consonants) becomes hi1ta22ē3
. Examples:
lbš
לבש = הִתְלַבֵּש ("he got dressed").
Voiceless alveolar fricative: root skl
סכל = histakkēl
הִסְתַּכֵּל ("he looked [at something]").
Voiceless postalveolar fricative: root šdl
שדל = hištaddēl
הִשְתַּדֵּל ("he made an effort").
Voiced alveolar fricative: root zqn
זקן = hizdaqqēn
הִזְדַּקֵּן ("he grew old"); with assimilation of the T of the conjugation.
Voiceless velarized alveolar fricative: root צלם = הִצְטַלֵּם ("he had a photograph of him taken"); with assimilation of the T of the conjugation.
Metathesis in Hungarian
In case of a very narrow range of HungarianHungarian is a Uralic language unrelated to most other languages in Europe. It is mainly spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in the seven neighbouring countries...
nouns, metathesis occurs before accusative caseThe accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
ending, possessive suffixIn linguistics, a possessive suffix is a suffix attached to a noun to indicate its possessor, much in the manner of possessive adjectives. Possessive suffixes do not exist in all languages; they do exist in some Uralic, Semitic, and Indo-European languages...
es, and in pluralPlural, commonly abbreviated pl., is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. In the English language, singular and plural are the only grammatical numbers.-English:...
:
kehely
, kelyhet
, kelyhem
, kelyhek
– chalice, chalice (accusativeThe accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
), my chalice, chalices
teher
, terhet
, terhed
, terhek
– burden, burden (accusativeThe accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
), your burden, burdens
pehely
, pelyhet
, pelyhe
, pelyhek
– flake, flake (accusativeThe accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
), his/her flake, flakes
Note that in all the examples above, the consonant h is transposed to the end of the
stemIn linguistics, a stem is a part of a word. The term is used with slightly different meanings.In one usage, a stem is a form to which affixes can be attached...
.
Metathesis in Telugu
From a comparative study of
DravidianThe Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 73 languages, spoken by around 200 million people. They are mainly spoken in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, and overseas in other...
vocabularies, one can observe that the retroflex consonants and the liquids of the alveolar series do not occur initially in common Dravidian etyma, but
TeluguTelugu is a Dravidian language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the official language of Andhra Pradesh, one of the largest states of India. It is also one of the twenty-two scheduled languages of the Republic of India and was conferred the status of a Classical language by the Government...
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 (if it had been single); 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 (derivative) suffix syllables. These statements and the resulting sequences of vowel contraction may be summed up as follows:
Type 1: V
1C
1-C² > C
1V
1-C²C²
Type 2: V
1C
1-V²- > C
1V
1-
Examples:
- lē = lēta (young, tener) < *eɭa
- rē = rēyi (night) < *ira
- rōlu (mortar)<
Metathesis in American Sign Language
In
ASLAmerican Sign Language is the dominant sign language of the Deaf community in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in some regions of Mexico...
, 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. For example the sign DEAF, prototypically made with the '1' handshape making contact first with the cheek and then moving to contact the jaw (as in the sentence FATHER DEAF) can have these locations reversed if the preceding sign, when part of the same
constituentIn syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that functions as a single unit within a hierarchical structure.Phrases are usually constituents of a clause, but clauses may also be embedded into a bigger structure...
, has a final location more proximal to the jaw (as in the sentence MOTHER DEAF). Both forms of the sign DEAF are acceptable to native signers. (This information has not been cited. Use with caution. Please, refer to Linguistics of American Sign Language: An Introduction
(1995, pp. 43–44), C. Valli & C. Lucas, Gallaudet University Press.)
Examples in popular culture
In the Hollow Pursuits"Hollow Pursuits" is the 69th episode of the science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the 21st episode of the third season...
episode of
Star Trek: The Next GenerationStar Trek: The Next Generation is a science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry as part of the Star Trek franchise. Created about 21 years after the original Star Trek, and set in the 24th century about 80 years after the orginal series, the program features a new crew and a new...
,
Lt. Commander DataLieutenant Commander Data , played by Brent Spiner, is a character in Star Trek: The Next Generation television series and in the four subsequent The Next Generation films....
explains the meaning of metathesis after
Captain PicardJean-Luc Picard is a Star Trek character primarily portrayed by actor Patrick Stewart. He appears in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation and the feature films Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Star Trek Nemesis and made an appearance in...
mistakenly calls
Lt. BarclayLieutenant Reginald Endicott "Broccoli" Barclay III, played by Dwight Schultz, is a recurring character in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation...
"Mr.
BroccoliBroccoli is a plant of the cabbage family Brassicaceae .It is classified as a cultivar group of the species Brassica oleracea...
". After Barclay leaves, Data says to the captain, "metathesis is one of the most common of pronunciation errors, sir; a reversal of vowel and consonant; 'barc' to broc'...". Data mispronounces the word 'metathesis', stressing the third rather than the second syllable.
External links