Consonant mutation
Consonant mutation is change in a consonant in a word according to its morphological or syntactic environment.
Mutation occurs in languages around the world. A prototypical example of consonant mutation is the initial consonant mutation of all modern Celtic languages. Initial consonant mutation is also found in Indonesian or Malay, in Nivkh, in Southern Paiute and in several West African languages such as Fula. The Nilotic language Dholuo, spoken in Kenya, shows mutation of stem-final consonants, as does English to a small extent. Mutation of initial, medial and final consonants is found in Modern Hebrew. Also, Japanese exhibits word medial consonant mutation involving voicing, rendaku, in many compounds. Uralic languages like Finnish show consonant gradation, a type of consonant mutation.
Similar sound changes
Initial consonant mutation must not be confused with sandhi, which can refer to word-initial alternations triggered by their phonological environment, unlike mutations, which are triggered by their morphosyntactic environment. Some examples of word-initial sandhi are listed below.- Spanish:, occurring after nasals and pause, alternate with, occurring after vowels and liquid consonants. Example: un arco 'a boat', mi arco 'my boat'. This also occurs in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Tamil.
- Scottish Gaelic: in some dialects, stops in stressed syllables are voiced after nasals, e.g. cat 'a cat', an cat 'the cat'.
Examples
English
In Old English, velar stops were palatalized in certain cases but not others. That resulted in some alternations, many of which have been levelled, but traces occur in some word doublets such as ditch and dik'e.In the past tense of certain verbs, English also retains traces of several ancient sound developments such as *kt > *xt and *ŋx > *x; many of them have been further complicated by the loss of in Middle English.
- seek : sought
- think : thought
A second palatalization, called yod-coalescence, occurs in loanwords from Latin. One subtype affects the sibilant consonants: earlier and were palatalized, leading to an alternation between alveolar and postalveolar.
- induce : induction
- magic : magus
- act
Celtic languages
The Insular Celtic languages are well-known for their initial consonant mutations. The individual languages vary on the number of mutations available: Scottish Gaelic has one, Irish and Manx have two, Welsh, Cornish and Breton have four. Cornish and Breton have so-called mixed mutations; a trigger causes one mutation to some sounds and another to other sounds. Welsh also has a mixed mutation. The languages vary on the environments for the mutations, but some generalizations can be made. Those languages all have feminine singular nouns mutated after the definite article, with adjectives mutated after feminine singular nouns. In most of the languages, the possessive determiners trigger various mutations. Here are some examples from Breton, Cornish, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh:| Breton | Cornish | Welsh | Irish | Scottish Gaelic | Gloss |
| gwreg | gwreg | gwraig | bean | bean | woman/''wife |
| bras | bras | mawr | mór | mòr | big |
| ar wreg vras | an wreg vras | y wraig fawr | an bhean mhór | a' bhean mhòr | the big woman |
| kazh | kath | cath | cat | cat | cat |
| e gazh | y gath | ei gath | a chat | a chat | his cat |
| he c'hazh | hy hath | ei chath | a cat | a cat | her cat |
| o c'hazh | aga hath | eu cath | a gcat | an cat | their cat |
Older textbooks on Gaelic sometimes refer to the c → ch mutation as "aspiration", but it is not aspiration in the sense of the word used by modern phoneticians, and linguists prefer to speak of lenition here.
Historically, the Celtic initial mutations originated from progressive assimilation and sandhi phenomena between adjacent words. For example, the mutating effect of the conjunction a'' 'and' is from the word once having the form *ak, and the final consonant influenced the following sounds.
Welsh
has three main classes of initial consonant mutation: soft mutation ; nasal mutation ; and aspirate mutation, which is sometimes called spirant mutation. The fourth category is mixed mutation, which calls for an aspirate mutation if possible but otherwise a soft mutation. The following tables show the range of Welsh mutations with examples. A blank cell indicates that no change occurs.The mutation ts → j corresponds to the t → d mutation and reflects a change heard in modern words borrowed from English. Borrowed words like tsips/jips can often be heard in Wales. Dw i'n mynd i gael tsips 'I'm going to get chips'; Mae gen i jips 'I have chips'. However, the ts → j mutation is not usually included the classic list of Welsh mutations and is rarely taught in formal classes. Nevertheless, it is a part of the colloquial language and is used by native speakers. Initial consonant mutation is often used to indicate grammatical gender of nouns in Welsh, but only in singular words. For example, y dyn "the man" vs. y ddynes "the woman"; y bachgen mawr "the big boy" vs. y ferch fawr "the big girl". With plural words there are no mutations, e.g. y bechgyn mawr "the big boys", y merched mawr "the big girls". Mutation can also distinguish the possessive pronouns "his" and "her", e.g. ei dad "his father" vs. ei thad "her father". Again when the pronoun is plural there is no mutation: eu tad "their father". Mutation of consonants is found not only at the beginning of words but also internally in compounds, affecting not only the beginning of the second element but also sometimes the end of the first element, e.g. cofio "remember", anghofio "forget"; cymuned "community", cyfoes "contemporary". ''h''-prothesisis a feature in Welsh in which a vowel-initial word becomes h-initial. It occurs after the possessive pronouns ei 'her', ein 'our', and eu 'their': oedran 'age', ei hoedran 'her age'. It also occurs with ugain 'twenty' after ar 'on' in the traditional counting system: un ar hugain 'twenty-one', literally "one on twenty".Irishhas two consonant mutations: lenition and eclipsis.LenitionLenition is indicated by an following the consonant in question or, in some older typefaces and texts, by an overdot above the letter that has undergone lenition. The effects of lenition are as follows:
EclipsisThe following tables show how eclipsis affects the start of words. Eclipsis is represented in the orthography by adding a letter, or occasionally two letters, to the start of the word. If the word is to be capitalised, the original first letter is capitalised, not the letter or letters added for eclipsis, e.g. the in Amhrán na bhFiann, Ireland's national anthem.
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