caeruleancentaur, On 08/12/2005 17:46:
> There is a phonetic phenomenon in Senjecan that occurs when the
> personal pronoun nominative + the present tense marker are prefixed to
> a verbnoun with an initial vowel.
>
> m-i-ât-a /mi'at_da/
> 1sg.-pres.-go-indic.
> I go.
>
> This becomes mïâta. m_j'at_da
>
> Is there a proper name for this phenomenon? It doesn't seem to me to
> be either lenition (as David Crystal defines it) or elision.
'Synizesis' is the collapse of two heterosyllabic vowels into a
homosyllabic sequence of vowel + glide or glide + vowel. Also
'synaeresis'. 'Samprasarana' is alternation between glide and
syllabic forms of a vocoid. 'Coalescence' is when a sequence of
two segments fuses into a single segment. So the Senjecan
phenomenon might be called 'coalescent synizesis' or 'synizetic
coalescence'.
--And.