Vowel hiatus

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. Epenthesis can be seen for instance with intrusive R in multiple varieties of English, in which an R sound is inserted where there is no written R, in order to avoid vowel hiatus. Additionally, some non-rhotic dialects of English often insert a rhotic () to avoid hiatus after non-high word-final or occasionally morpheme-final vowels, in a process known as linking R.

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 change in spelling), or contractions such as αει->ᾷ.

Glide formation

The first of the two vowels may be converted to a glide 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 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 and French, 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 poëzie ("poetry") and the French word ambiguë (feminine form of ambigu, "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. 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, 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.