'joining', IAST: sandhi [sɐndʱi]) is any of a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries.
Sandhi is, however, reflected in the orthography of Sanskrit, Sinhala, Telugu, Marathi, Pali and some other Indian languages, as with Italian in the case of compound words with lexicalised syntactic gemination.
External sandhi effects can sometimes become morphologised (apply only in certain morphological and syntactic environments) as in Tamil[1][2] and, over time, turn into consonant mutations.
Following are some examples from Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh: When two words belonging to the same phrase are pronounced together, or two morphemes are joined in a word, the last sound in the first may be affected by the first sound of the next (sandhi), either coalescing with it, or becoming shorter (a semivowel), or being deleted.
As was mentioned above, the dialects of Portuguese can be divided into two groups, according to whether syllable-final sibilants are pronounced as postalveolar consonants /ʃ/, /ʒ/ or as alveolar /s/, /z/.
This applies also to words that are pronounced together in connected speech: Normally, only the three vowels /ɐ/, /i/ (in BP) or /ɨ/ (in EP), and /u/ occur in unstressed final position.
Thus, If the next word begins with a dissimilar vowel, then /i/ and /u/ become approximants in Brazilian Portuguese (synaeresis): In careful speech and in with certain function words, or in some phrase stress conditions (see Mateus and d'Andrade, for details), European Portuguese has a similar process: But in other prosodic conditions, and in relaxed pronunciation, EP simply drops final unstressed /ɨ/ and /u/ (elision), though this is subject to significant dialectal variation: Aside from historical set contractions formed by prepositions plus determiners or pronouns, like à/dà, ao/do, nesse, dele, etc., on one hand and combined cliticpronouns such as mo/ma/mos/mas (it/him/her/them to/for me), and so on, on the other, Portuguese spelling does not reflect vowel sandhi.
The vowels [iː], [ɪ], and [ɪː] (including [ɛɪ], [ɑɪ], and [ɔɪ]) take a sandhi of [j] (voiced palatal approximant).
All other vowels take [ɹ] (voiced alveolar approximant) (see linking and intrusive R).
In some situations, especially when a vowel is reduced to a schwa, certain dialects may instead use a glottal stop [ʔ].
Note that in this case the glottal stop occurs at the start of "eat" rather than at the end of "gonna".
In Japanese phonology, sandhi is primarily exhibited in rendaku (consonant mutation from unvoiced to voiced when not word-initial, in some contexts) and conversion of つ or く (tsu, ku) to a geminate consonant (orthographically, the sokuon っ), both of which are reflected in spelling – indeed, the っ symbol for gemination is morphosyntactically derived from つ, and voicing is indicated by adding two dots as in か／が ka, ga, making the relation clear.
It also occurs much less often in renjō (連声), where, most commonly, a terminal /n/ on one morpheme results in an /n/ (or /m/) being added to the start of the next morpheme, as in 天皇: てん ＋ おう → てんのう (ten + ō = tennō), meaning "emperor"; that is also shown in the spelling (the kanji do not change, but the kana, which specify pronunciation, change).
[7] "The choice of whether the glide inserted will be (ய், Y and வ், V) in Tamil is determined by whether the vowel preceding the glide is a front vowel such as Tamil: இ, ஈ, எ, ஏ or ஐ, romanized: i, ī, e, ē or ai or a back vowel, such as Tamil: உ, ஊ, ஒ, ஓ, அ or ஆ, romanized: u, ū, o, ō, a or ā.
In rapid speech, especially in polysyllabic words: Tamil: இந்த்யாவுலேருந்து, romanized: Intyāvulēruntu, lit.
[7] In lateral-stop clusters, the lateral assimilates to the stop's manner of articulation, before c, ṇ too becomes ṭ, eg.
nal-mai, kal-kaḷ, vaṟaḷ-ci, kāṇ-ci, eḷ-ney > naṉmai, kaṟkaḷ, vaṟaṭci, kāṭci, eṇṇey (ṟ was historically a plosive).