Fusion

In phonetics and historical linguistics, fusion is the merger of the features of two segment into one.

A common form of fusion is found in the development of nasal vowels, which frequently become phonemic when final nasal consonants are lost from a language. This occurred in French and Portuguese. Compare the French words un vin blanc [œ̃ vɛ̃ blɑ̃] "a white wine" with their English cognates, one, vine, blank, which retain the n's.

Another example is the development of Greek bous "cow" from Indo-European *gwous. Although *gw was already a single consonant, [ɡʷ], it had two places of articulation, a velar stop ([ɡ]) and labial secondary articulation ([ʷ]). In Greek bous these elements have fused into a purely labial stop [b].

An extreme example of fusion occurred in Old Irish, where a vowel fused with a consonant before another consonant. The only feature that remained of the lost consonant was its length, in the form of a long vowel: *[magl] → [maːl] "prince". This phenomenon is called compensatory lengthening.

See also

• Unpacking, the opposite of fusion.

References

• Crowley, Terry. (1997) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3rd edition. Oxford University Press.

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