Fusion (phonetics)

A common form of fusion is found in the development of nasal vowels, which frequently become phonemic when final nasal consonants are lost from a language. This occurred in French and Portuguese. Compare the French words un vin blanc "a white wine" with their English cognates, one, vine, blank, which retain the n's.

Another example is the development of Greek bous "cow" from Indo-European *gwous. Although *gw was already a single consonant, [ɡʷ], it had two places of articulation, a velar stop ([ɡ]) and labial secondary articulation ([ʷ]). In Greek bous these elements have fused into a purely labial stop [b].

An extreme example of fusion occurred in Old Irish, where a vowel fused with a consonant before another consonant. The only feature that remained of the lost consonant was its length, in the form of a long vowel: *[magl] → [maːl] "prince". This phenomenon is called compensatory lengthening.

See also

References

• Crowley, Terry. (1997) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3rd edition. Oxford University Press.