Learn a Phonological Process with ChatGPT

In my interaction with ChatGPT, I learned about the phonological processes of Insertion and Deletion . The full conversation can be found here.

Insertion (Epenthesis)

Insertion comes in many forms, but it tends to come down to either consonant insertion or vowel insertion. In English, vowel insertion is much more common. There are explicit terms for inserting vowels a the start (prothesis) or end (paragoge) of a word. One example of insertion would be pronouncing “athlete” as “athəlete” by inserting a schwa.

Deletion (Elision)

Deletion happens whenever a sound is removed. Again, this often is split into consonant and vowel deletion, but there are specific terms for when sounds are deleted from the beginning (apheresis) or the end (apocope). Another interesting kind of deletion is cluster reduction, where a sound from a consonant cluster is removed to make it easier to pronounce. An example of the latter is the deletion of the first “r” in “library,” leading to it being pronounced like “libary.” Another really interesting example is that words like “knight” and “know” used to be pronounced with the initial /k/ sound but it was deleted.

Causes

As with many processes, one potential reason to insert or delete sounds is to conform to the rules of the language itself. This comes up a lot when dealing with loan words. The example given by ChatGPT was the Spanish requirement that if a word starts with a cluster of /s/ and a consonant, it must be preceded by an /e/. This led to words like “escuela” from the Latin “schola.”

Other reasons for deletion and insertion have to do with the relationship between ease of articulation and efficiency. Insertions tend to happen when words are hard to pronounce correctly otherwise. Likewise, deletions tend to happen when words take too long to say or are not convenient enough. So there is always a tension between trying to be efficient while still being intelligible.

Reversal

I was curious if there were any examples of historical deletions being re-inserted, or vice versa. I learned about hypercorrection, where a speaker incorrectly applies a rule in an attempt to be more “correct.” An example of hypercorrection is someone pronouncing the first “r” in “Februrary,” even though that is not standard even in formal speech.