Hiatus

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Hiatus (Latin "yawning") (pronounced /haɪˈeɪtəs/) in linguistics is the separate pronunciation of two adjacent vowels, sometimes with an intervening glottal stop.^{[citation needed]} In poetic metre (or "poetic meter"), hiatus can also refer to the failure of two vowels straddling a word boundary to coalesce, for example by elision of the first vowel.

In written English it was formerly common to use a diaeresis mark (or "trema") to indicate a hiatus (for example: coöperate, daïs, reëlect), but this is increasingly rare in modern English. Nowadays the diaeresis is normally left out (cooperate), or a hyphen is used (co-operate). It is, however, still common in loanwords such as naïve and noël.

Many languages disallow hiatus, avoiding it either by deleting or assimilating the vowel, or by adding an extra consonant. In particular, some (but not all) non-rhotic dialects of English insert an /r/ to avoid hiatus after many vowels, although prescriptive guides for Received Pronunciation discourage this^[1].

In Greek and Latin poetry, hiatus is generally avoided, though it does occur in many authors under certain rules with varying degrees of poetic licence. Strategies of avoidance of hiatus include elisio (elision of final vowel), prodelisio (elision of initial vowel, rare) and synaloiphe/krasis (synalepha and crasis, merging final and initial vowels). Other strategies include shortening of final long vowels, maybe in connection with a process of synalepha or crasis, or the transformation of vowels (or final diphthong components) into semivowels (e.g. /ai/ → /aj/, /au/ → /aw/). This latter process is sometimes also at work in the English pronunciation of the Latin word "hiatus" (sometimes pronounced with a distinct y sound between the first two syllables). The Classical Latin word hiātus was pronounced /hi.aː.tus/ and originally meant "gaping."

References

1. ^ "Voice and Speech in the Theatre"

See also

• Diaeresis
• Diphthong
• Linking and intrusive R
• Vowel cluster

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