In linguistics, prothesis (/ˈprɒθɪsɪs/; from post-classical Latin[1] based on Ancient Greek: πρόθεσις próthesis 'placing before'),[2][3] or less commonly[4] prosthesis (from Ancient Greek πρόσθεσις prósthesis 'addition')[5][6] is the addition of a sound or syllable at the beginning of a word without changing the word's meaning or the rest of its structure.
An example is that /s/ + stop clusters (known as s impurum), in Latin, gained a preceding /e/ in early Romance languages (Old Spanish, Old French, Galician-Portuguese).
of Nenets, the rule remains productive: the initial syllable cannot start with a vowel, and vowel-initial loanwords are adapted with prothetic /ŋ/.
Hindi words from English have an initial i before sp-, sk- or sm-: school → iskuul, special → ispesal, stop → istahp.
In Persian, loanwords with an initial sp-, st-, sk- or sm- add a short vowel e at the beginning: spray → esprey, stadium → estadiun, Stalin → Estalin, skate → eskeyt, scan → eskan, etc.
[8] Some Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, regularly break up initial two-consonant clusters by adding a prothetic vowel.
Modern Irish features t-prothesis in certain circumstances, such as when a vowel-initial masculine noun in the singular nominative is preceded by the article (e.g. an t-aer 'the air'); or when a feminine noun beginning with s- in the singular nominative is preceded by the article (e.g. an tsúil 'the eye').
[citation needed] A dropped final n was originally retained then, but the process now occurs in contexts in which n never existed.