Metathesis ( mə-TATH-ə-siss; from Greek μετάθεσις, from μετατίθημι "to put in a different order") is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence. Most commonly, it refers to the interchange of two or more contiguous segments or syllables, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:
anemone > **anenome (onset consonants of adjacent syllables) cavalry > **calvary (codas of adjacent syllables) Metathesis may also involve interchanging non-contiguous sounds, known as nonadjacent metathesis, long-distance metathesis, or hyperthesis, as shown in these examples of metathesis sound change from Latin to Spanish:
Latin parabola > Spanish palabra "word" Latin miraculum > Spanish milagro "miracle" Latin periculum > Spanish peligro "danger, peril" Latin crocodilus > Spanish cocodrilo "crocodile" Many languages have words that show this phenomenon, and some even use it as a regular part of their grammar, such as Hebrew and Fur. The process of metathesis has altered the shape of many familiar words in English as well. The original form before metathesis may be deduced from older forms of words in the language's lexicon or, if no forms are preserved, from phonological reconstruction. In some cases it is not possible to settle with certainty on the original version.
Rhetorical metathesis Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a historian and scholar in rhetoric living in 1st century BC Greece. He analysed classical texts and applied several revisions to make them sound more eloquent. One of the methods he used was re-writing documents on a mainly grammatical level: changing word and sentence orders would make texts more fluent and "natural", he suggested. He called this way of re-writing metathesis.
Examples
American Sign Language In American Sign Language, several signs which have a pre-specified initial and final location in reference to the body of the person signing (such as the signs RESTAURANT, PARENT, or TWINS) can have the order of these two locations reversed in contexts which seem to be purely phonological. While not possible with all signs, this does happen with quite a few. For example, the sign DEAF, prototypically made with the "1" handshape making contact first with the cheek and then moving to contact the jaw (as in the sentence FATHER DEAF), can have these locations reversed if the preceding sign, when part of the same constituent, has a final location more proximal to the jaw (as in the sentence MOTHER DEAF). Both forms of the sign DEAF are acceptable to native signers. A proposed prerequisite for metathesis to apply in ASL is that both signs must be within the same region on the body. Constraints on the applications of metathesis in ASL has led to discussions that the phonology breaks down the body into regions distinct from settings.
Amharic Amharic has a few minor patterns of metathesis, as shown by Wolf Leslau. For example, "matches" [kəbrit] is sometimes pronounced as [kərbit], [mogzit] "nanny" is sometimes pronounced as [mozgit]. The word "Monday" is [säɲo], which is the base for "Tuesday" [maksäɲo], which is often metathesized as [maskäɲo]. All of these examples show a pair of consonants reversed so that the stop begins the next syllable.
Azerbaijani Metathesis among neighbouring consonants happens very commonly in Azerbaijani:
köprü > körpü "bridge" yapraq > yarpaq "leaf" topraq > torpaq "soil" tütsü > tüstü "smoke"
Basque The phenomenon is quite common dialectally. -euskara (Southern dialects, Standard Basque) vs. eskuara (Navarro-Labourdin dialect), meaning "Basque language"). -lukete (Standard Basque, Northern dialects) vs. luteke (Navarrese dialect), conditional non-past auxiliary transitive verb, as in "ikusiko lukete", meaning "they would see it / him / her"). -pertsona ("person", Standard Basque and most dialects) vs. presuna ("Low-Navarrese dialect). -hodei ("cloud", Standard Basque, Southern dialects) vs. hedoi .. (Northern dialects).
Danish Some common nonstandard pronunciations of Danish words employ metathesis:
billeder > bidler "pictures" gennem > gemmen "through" But metathesis has also historically changed some words:
kros > kors " (Christian) cross"
Egyptian Arabic A common example of metathesis in Egyptian Arabic is when the order of the word's root consonants has changed.
Classical Arabic zawj > Egyptian Arabic gōz "husband" Classical Arabic mil‘aqah > ma‘la’a "spoon" The following examples of metathesis have been identified in Egyptian Arabic texts, but are not necessarily more common than their etymological spellings:
Allāh yil‘an > Allāh yin‘al "God curse!" fir’a masṛaḥiyyah > fir’a maṛsaḥiyya "theatre troupe" falsafah > falfasa "philosophy" The following loanwords are also sometimes found with metathesis:
manalog > malanōg "monologue" Persian zanjabil > Egyptian Arabic ganzabīl ~ zanzabīl "ginger" isbitalya > istibalya "hospital" banalti > balanti "penalty" (in football) The likely cause for metathesis in the word "hospital" is that the result resembles a common word pattern familiar to Arabic speakers (namely a Form X verbal noun). Perhaps the clearest example of metathesis in Egyptian Arabic is the modern name of the city of Alexandria: (Al-)Iskandariya (الإسكندرية). In addition to the metathesis of x /ks/ to /sk/, the initial Al of Alexandria has been reanalyzed as the Arabic definite article.
English Metathesis is responsible for some common speech errors, such as children acquiring spaghetti as pasketti. The word ask has the nonstandard variant ax pronounced /æks/; the spelling ask is found in Shakespeare and in the King James Bible and ax in Chaucer, Caxton, and the Coverdale Bible. The word "ask" derives from Proto-Germanic *aiskōną. Some other frequent English pronunciations that display metathesis are:
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