In phonology, hiatus ( ) or diaeresis ( ;
Preference
Some languages do not have diphthongs, except sometimes in rapid speech, or they have a limited number of diphthongs but also numerous vowel sequences that cannot form diphthongs and so appear in hiatus. That is the case for
Nuosu language,
Bantu languages like
Swahili language, and
Lakota language. An example is Swahili eua 'purify' with three syllables.
Avoidance
Many languages disallow or restrict hiatus and avoid it by deleting or assimilating the vowel sound or by adding an extra consonant sound.
Epenthesis
A consonant sound may be added between vowels (
epenthesis) to prevent hiatus. That is most often a
semivowel or a glottal, but all kinds of other consonants can be used as well, depending on the language and the quality of the two adjacent vowels. For example, some non-rhotic dialects of English often insert to avoid hiatus after non-high word-final or occasionally morpheme-final vowels.
[ "Voice and Speech in the Theatre"]
Contraction
In Greek and Latin poetry, hiatus is generally avoided although it occurs in many authors under certain rules, with varying degrees of poetic licence. Hiatus may be avoided by
elision of a final vowel, occasionally
prodelision (elision of initial vowel),
synizesis (pronunciation of two vowels as one without a change in spelling), or contractions such as αει->ᾷ.
Glide formation
The first of the two vowels may be converted to a
Semivowel to prevent hiatus. This differs from epenthesis as described above, since only one of the two vowels is retained in its original form. For example, in
Luganda, is realised as .
In some cases, this may result in the transfer of accent and/or
Vowel length from the first to the second vowel, e.g. Icelandic sjá]] ← *sé + a.
Transcription
When necessary to indicate a hiatus, either for general clarity or to distinguish it from a diphthong, the International Phonetic Alphabet uses a period to indicate the syllable break. For example,
lower can be transcribed , with a period separating the first syllable, , from the second syllable, .
Marking
Diaeresis
In
Dutch language and
French language, the second of two vowels in hiatus is marked with a
diacritic (or tréma) if otherwise that combination could be interpreted as a single vowel (namely either a diphthong, a long vowel, or as having one of the vowels silent, etc.). Examples are the Dutch word
("poetry") and the French word (feminine form of
, "ambiguous"). This usage is occasionally seen in English (such as
coöperate,
daïs and
reëlect) but has never been common, and over the last century, its use in such words has been dropped or replaced by the use of a hyphen except in a very few publications, notably
The New Yorker.
[ diaeresis: December 9, 1998. The Mavens' Word of the Day. Random House.][ Umlauts in English?. General Questions. Straight Dope Message Board.] It is, however, still sometimes seen in
loanwords such as
naïve and
Noël and in the proper names
Zoë and
Chloë.
Other ways
In
German language, hiatus between
monophthongs is usually written with an intervening
h, as in ziehen "to pull"; drohen "to threaten"; sehen "to see". In a few words (such as ziehen), the
h represents a consonant that has become silent, but in most cases, it was added later simply to indicate the end of the stem. In colloquial speech the examples above drop the second syllable schwa altogether: ziehen , drohen , sehen .
Similarly, in Scottish Gaelic, hiatus is written by a number of digraphs: bh, dh, gh, mh, th. Some examples include abhainn "river"; latha "day"; cumha "condition". The convention goes back to the Old Irish scribal tradition, but it is more consistently applied in Scottish Gaelic: lathe (> latha). However, hiatus in Old Irish was usually simply implied in certain vowel digraphs óe (> adha), ua (> ogha).
Correption
Correption is the shortening of a long vowel before a short vowel in hiatus.
See also
Further reading
