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In poetry and phonetics, epenthesis (Greek epi, "on" × en, "in" + thesis, "putting") refers to the insertion of a phoneme or syllable into a word, usually to facilitate pronunciation.
In songs and poetry, epenthesis is often used to make words conform to the meter. An example in an English song would be "The Umbrella Man" where the meter requires "umbrella" to be pronounced with four syllables "um-buh-rel-la", so "any umbrellas, any umbrellas" matches "toodle luma luma, toodle luma luma".
Regular or semiregular epenthesis commonly occurs in languages which use affixes. For example, /i/ is inserted before the English plural suffix -/z/ and the past tense suffix -/d/ when the root ends in a similar consonant. For example, glass -> glasses (/glasiz/) and bat -> batted (/batid/).
(An alternative view would be that the root form of these suffixes is /iz/ and /id/ repectively and that the /i/ undergoes elision in most cases.)
Epenthesis may also occur for ease of pronunciation in consonant clusters, especially unfamiliar or complex ones. For example, the name "Duane" is commonly pronounced with an epenthetic schwa between the /d/ and the /w/ at the beginning, and the word hamster is often pronounced with a /p/ after the /m/.
In English, epenthesis is often used for humourous or childlike effect, for example the cartoon characters Yogi Bear who says "pic-a-nic basket" and Homer Simpson who says "saxo-ma-phone".
Related phenomena
- Contraction is the opposite, the omission of a sound or syllable inside a word.
- Tmesis is the inclusion of a whole word in another one.
- Prothesis is the addition of a sound to the start of a word.
- Paragoge is the addition of a sound to the end of a word.
External link
Definition at BYU (http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/Figures/E/epenthesis.htm)
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