Sandhi

Sandhi (Sanskrit: सन्धि sandhi [sɐndʱi], "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function of the adjacent words. Sandhi belongs to morphophonology.

Sandhi occurs in many languages, particularly in the phonology of Indian languages (especially Sanskrit, Tamil, Sinhala, Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Pali, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese, Malayalam). Many dialects of British English show linking and intrusive R.

A subset of sandhi called tone sandhi more specifically refers to tone changes between words and syllables. This is a common feature of many tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese.

Types

Internal and external sandhi

Sandhi can be either

• internal, at morpheme boundaries within words, such as syn- + pathy: sympathy, or
• external, at word boundaries, such as the pronunciation "tem books" for ten books in some dialects of English. The linking /r/ process of some dialects of English ("I saw-r-a film" in British English) is a kind of external sandhi, as are French liaison (pronunciation of usually silent final consonants of words before words beginning with vowels) and Italian raddoppiamento fonosintattico (lengthening of initial consonants of words after certain words ending in vowels).

It may be extremely common in speech, but sandhi (especially external) is typically ignored in spelling, as is the case in English (exceptions: the distinction between a and an; the prefixes syn-, in-, en-, and con-). Sandhi is, however, reflected in the orthography of Sanskrit, Sinhala, Telugu, Marathi, Pali and some other Indian languages, as with Italian in the case of compound words with lexicalised syntactic gemination.

External sandhi effects can sometimes become morphologised (apply only in certain morphological and syntactic environments) as in Tamil^[1][2] and, over time, turn into consonant mutations.

Tone sandhi

Most tonal languages have tone sandhi in which the tones of words alter according to certain rules. An example is the behavior of Mandarin Chinese; in isolation, tone 3 is often pronounced as a falling-rising tone. When a tone 3 occurs before another tone 3, however, it changes into tone 2 (a rising tone), and when it occurs before any of the other tones, it is pronounced as a low falling tone with no rise at the end.

An example occurs in the common greeting 你好 nǐ hǎo (with two words containing underlying tone 3), which is in practice pronounced ní hǎo. The first word is pronounced with tone 2, but the second is unaffected.

Examples

Celtic languages

Main articles: Breton mutations, Cornish grammar § Initial consonant mutation, Welsh morphology § Initial consonant mutation, Irish initial mutations, Manx language § Initial consonant mutations, and Scottish Gaelic phonology § Lenition and spelling

In Celtic languages, the consonant mutation sees the initial consonant of a word to change according to its morphological or syntactic environment. Following are some examples from Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh:

Breton	Welsh	Irish	Scottish Gaelic	Gloss
gwreg	gwraig	bean	bean*	woman/wife
bras	mawr	mór	mòr	big
ar wreg vras	y wraig fawr	an bhean mhór	a' bhean mhòr	the big woman
kazh	cath	cat	cat	cat
e gazh	ei gath	a chat	a chat	his cat
he c'hazh	ei chath	a cat	a cat	her cat
o c'hazh	eu cath	a gcat	an cat	their cat

French

The French liaison, in which a word-final consonant that is normally silent when occurring at the end of a phrase or before another consonant, is pronounced as if part of the next word when followed by a vowel, can be considered a form of external sandhi. For example, deux frères (two brothers) is pronounced /dø fʁɛʁ/ with a silent ⟨x⟩, and quatre hommes (four men) is pronounced /katʁ ɔm/, but deux hommes (two men) is pronounced /dø‿zɔm/.

Japanese

In Japanese phonology, sandhi is primarily exhibited in rendaku (consonant mutation from unvoiced to voiced when not word-initial, in some contexts) and conversion of つ or く (tsu, ku) to a geminate consonant (orthographically, the sokuon っ), both of which are reflected in spelling – indeed, the っ symbol for gemination is morphosyntactically derived from つ, and voicing is indicated by adding two dots as in か／が ka, ga, making the relation clear. It also occurs much less often in renjō (連声), where, most commonly, a terminal /n/ on one morpheme results in an /n/ (or /m/) being added to the start of the next morpheme, as in 天皇: てん ＋ おう → てんのう (ten + ō = tennō); that is also shown in the spelling (the kanji do not change, but the kana, which specify pronunciation, change).

Korean

Korean has sandhi which occurs in the final consonant or consonant cluster, such that a morpheme can have two pronunciations depending on whether or not it is followed by a vowel. For example, the root "읽" /ik/, meaning read, sounds like /iɾk/ before vowels, such as in, 읽으세요 /iɾkɯse̞jo/, meaning please read. Some roots can also aspirate following consonants, denoted by the letter ㅎ (hieut) in the final consonant. This causes "다" /tɐ/ to become /tʰɐ/ in 않다 /ɐntʰɐ/ (to be not).^[3]

See also

• Alternation (linguistics)
• Crasis
• Elision
• Liaison (French)
• Linking and intrusive R
• Movable nu

References

1. Schiffman, Harold F. (1999). A Reference Grammar of Spoken Tamil. Cambridge University Press. p. 20. ISBN 9780521640749.
2. Hemalatha Nagarajan. "Gemination of stops in Tamil: implications for the phonology-syntax interface" (PDF).
3. "Korean Sound Change Rules". Miss Elly Korean. 6 September 2020. Retrieved 22 October 2022.

External links

 

Look up sandhi in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Sandhi Calculator by Vedic Society