Metathesis ( ; from Greek , from "to put in a different order") 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 segments or syllables, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:
anemone > **anenome (onset consonants of adjacent syllables) cavalry > **calvary (codas of adjacent syllables)
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:
Latin > Spanish "word" Latin > Spanish "miracle" Latin > Spanish "danger, peril" Latin > Spanish "crocodile" 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 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 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
American Sign Language In American Sign Language, several signs which have a pre-specified initial and final location in reference to the body of the person signing (such as the signs RESTAURANT, PARENT, or TWINS) 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 (as in the sentence FATHER DEAF), can have these locations reversed if the preceding sign, when part of the same constituent, 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. 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.
Amharic Amharic has a few minor patterns of metathesis, as shown by Wolf Leslau.pages 27, 28. Wolf Leslau. 1995. Reference Grammar of Amharic. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden. 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.
Azerbaijani Metathesis among neighbouring consonants happens very commonly in Azerbaijani: > "bridge" > "leaf" > "soil" > "smoke"
Basque The phenomenon is quite common dialectally.
-euskara (Southern dialects, Standard Basque) vs. eskuara (Navarro-Labourdin dialect), meaning "Basque language").
-lukete (Standard Basque, Northern dialects) vs. luteke (Navarrese dialect), conditional non-past auxiliary transitive verb, as in "ikusiko lukete", meaning "they would see it / him / her").
-pertsona ("person", Standard Basque and most dialects) vs. presuna ("Low-Navarrese dialect).
-hodei ("cloud", Standard Basque, Southern dialects) vs. hedoi .. (Northern dialects).
Danish Some common nonstandard pronunciations of Danish words employ metathesis:
> "pictures" > "through"
But metathesis has also historically changed some words:
> " (Christian) cross"
Egyptian Arabic A common example of metathesis in Egyptian Arabic is when the order of the word's root consonants has changed.
Classical Arabic > Egyptian Arabic gōz "husband" Classical Arabic > ma‘la’a "spoon"
The following examples of metathesis have been identified in Egyptian Arabic texts, but are not necessarily more common than their etymological spellings:
> "God curse!" > "theatre troupe" > "philosophy" The following loanwords are also sometimes found with metathesis: > "monologue" Persian zanjabil > Egyptian Arabic ganzabīl ~ zanzabīl "ginger" > "hospital" > "penalty" (in football) The likely cause for metathesis in the word "hospital" is that the result resembles a common word pattern familiar to Arabic speakers (namely a Form X verbal noun).
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.
English Metathesis is responsible for some common speech errors, such as children acquiring spaghetti as pasketti. The word ask has the nonstandard variant ax pronounced ; the spelling ask is found in Shakespeare and in the King James BibleOxford English Dictionary, 2nd. ed., under "ask". and ax in Chaucer, Caxton, and the Coverdale Bible. The word "ask" derives from Proto-Germanic *aiskōną.
Some other frequent English pronunciations that display metathesis are:
nuclear > nucular (re-analysed as nuke + -cular suffix in molecular, binocular) prescription > perscription introduce > interduce asterisk > asterix comfortable > comfturble cavalry > calvary iron > iorn foliage > foilage Oxford English Dictionary Online, Meriam Webster's Dictionary Online aforementioned > afrementioned pretty > purty Meriam Webster's Dictionary Online jewelry > jewlery animal > aminal
The process has shaped many English words historically. Bird and horse came from Old English and ; and were also written and .
The Old English underwent metathesis to , which became Modern English .
The Old English "three" formed "third" and þrēotene "thirteen". 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 , which became Modern English .
The Old English "hole" underwent metathesis to þryl. This gave rise to a verb "pierce", which became Modern English , and formed the compound "nose-hole" which became Modern English (May have occurred in the early Middle English Period: "nosþyrlu" ( 1050); "nos-thirlys" ( 1500). In 1565 "nosthrille" appears; "thirl"/"thurl" survived even longer, until 1878).
Metathesis is also a common feature of the West Country dialects.
Finnish In western dialects of Finnish, historical stem-final /h/ has been subject to metathesis (it is lost in standard Finnish). That leads to variant word forms:
"stallion" (standard * > ) "smoke" (standard * > ) "lie" (standard * > ) "boat" (standard * > )
Some words have been standardized in the metathetized form:
* > "sorrow" * > "family" * > "hero" * > "untrue"
Sporadic examples include the word "green", which derives from older , and the vernacular change of the word "jovial" to (also a separate word meaning "bristly").
French Etymological metathesis occurs in the following French words:
from popular Latin berbex meaning "sheep" (early 12th century). from popular Latin formaticus, meaning "formed in a mold" (1135). (1654) from French mousquitte (1603) by metathesis. From Spanish mosquito ("little fly").
Deliberate metathesis also occurs extensively in the informal French pattern of speech called verlan (itself an example: < , meaning "the reverse" or "the inverse"). 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:
> >
Ancient Greek In Greek, the present stem often consists of the root with a suffix of y (˰ in Greek). 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:
*cháryō > chaírō "I am glad" — echárē "he was glad" *phányō > phaínō "I reveal" — ephánē "he appeared"
For metathesis of vowel length, which occurs frequently in Attic and Ionic Greek, see quantitative metathesis.
Hebrew In Hebrew the verb conjugation (binyan) hitpaēl () undergoes metathesis if the first consonant of the root is an alveolar or postalveolar fricative. Namely, the pattern hiṯ1a22ē3 (where the numbers signify the root consonants) becomes hi1ta22ē3. Examples:
No metathesis: root lbš = hitlabbēš ("he got dressed"). Voiceless alveolar fricative: root skl = histakkēl ("he looked [at something]"). Voiceless postalveolar fricative: root šdl = hištaddēl ("he made an effort"). Voiced alveolar fricative: root zqn = hizdaqqēn ("he grew old"); with assimilation of the T of the conjugation. Voiceless alveolar affricate: root t͡slm = hit͡stallēm ("he had a photograph of him taken"); with assimilation (no longer audible) of the T of the conjugation.
Hebrew also features isolated historical examples of metathesis. For example, the words keves and kesev (meaning "lamb") both appear in the Torah.
Hindustani Like many other natural languages Urdu and Hindi also have metathesis like in this diachronic example:
Sanskrit () janma > Urdu and Hindi janam "Birth"
More examples Portuguese became Urdu () and Hindi (girjā), meaning "church"
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:
"chalice", but (accusative), (possessive), (plural) "burden", but (acc.), (poss.), (pl.) "flake", but (acc.), (poss.), (pl.)
The other instances are [intestinal] villus/fluff/fuzz/nap vs. bolyhok, vs. molyhos down/pubescence [on plants], and the obsolete animal's fetus (cf. vemhes "pregnant [animal]"). The first of them is often used in the regular form ().
Japanese for (), meaning "atmosphere" or "mood" 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.
for (), the former meaning "content [of news article]", "food ingredient", "material (for joke or artwork)", the latter "seed", "species","source" for The word for "sorry", gomen, is sometimes inverted to mengo (backslang).
Javanese Modern Javanese has some metathesis including changing sounds between Old Javanese to Modern Javanese, or between Standard Modern Javanese to its dialect forms. i.e. Old Javanese "krya" is adopted to Modern Javanese "karya" (work) or "kriya" (handwork), even the original sound must be "kreya".
Kildin Sami Metathesis is relatively common in Kildin Sami: some consonant clusters can have a metathetic option, and both forms oftentimes are considered to be equal variants of one another.
~ "the South; southern" Proto-Samic: *puolvë > ~ "knee" Proto-Samic: *pëlvë > ~ "cloud" Proto-Samic: *(h)uvjë > ~ "down (soft feathers)" Proto-Samic: *āvlē > ~ "horizontal bar with hooks for hanging a cauldron over a fire"
Kurdish In Kurdish no example has been found according to which sounds exchange places and this, in turn, clarifies the claim that metathesis in Kurdish is sporadic and irregular.
Maktab > Matkap