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Synizesis

Synizesis describes a process of sound change whereby two adjacent vowels, initially pronounced as two syllables (hiatus), are pronounced instead as a single syllable. Scholarship has described this phenomenon variously in terms of elision, coalescence, fusion and contraction, however the essential elements of this phenomenon involve its occurring within a single word, and the moraic reduction of the word's vowels.

The phenomenon has been most commonly observed in the context of classical poetry. In Ancient Greek and Latin poetry, the vowel contraction would often be necessitated by the metrical requirements of the form. Synizesis is also understood to occur as a natural product of language evolution over time. Many languages have displayed an aversion towards hiatus, and as such have evolved to favour synizetic pronunciations of vowels. However, hiatus has often inhered in contexts of formal register, in which the more enunciated hiatal pronunciation has retained a sense of formality.

This article focuses on the occurrence of this phenomenon in the various language families and contexts in which scholarship has contemplated it to exist, namely the European and East Asian languages.

Practicing citations

Kang, a professor of Korean at Chosun University who has published in both Korean and English variously on Korean linguistics and prosody, explores the strategies by which and reasons why Korean avoids vowel hiatus.

This overview of synizesis from Old Latin through to Vulgar Latin was published by Robert Radford, who wrote on Ovid, and wrote numerous articles on Latin and Greek meter and vowel contraction for Classical Philology and The American Journal of Philology.

Rumanék is an assistant professor of Japanese studies from Masaryk University in Brno, and has written on pre-modern Japanese verse, music and mythology.

Rytting has written on computational linguistics in the contexts of modern Greek and Arabic, and for this article completed three experiments with a wide demographic of Greek speakers, asking them to listen to or read certain phrases, and noting whether a formal context and register was conducive to the occurrence of hiatus or of synizesis.

W.B. Stanford was a well-known and prolific Irish classicist, who wrote literary criticisms on such authors as Homer, Aristophanes and Sophocles.

Answers to module 7 questions

Iliad 1.1, recited to demonstrate synizesis in Πηληϊάδεω in the fifth foot.

The audio recording is of a classicist reciting the opening line of the Iliad, with the aim of demonstrating synizesis in the fifth foot.

• It is my own work
• The file format is WAV (.wav)
• The license chosen is Creative Commons CC0 Public Dedication 1.0 license: {{self|cc0}}.
• I will add it to Category: Classics
• The description is below the file