Combinative Sound Changes

a result of the influence of surrounding sounds in the spoken chain. Among the types of combinative sound changes are assimilation, dissimilation, and accommodation—the adaptation of consonants to vowels and vowels to consonants (Russian igry, “games,” and otygran, “won back”); elimination of sounds (sontse instead of solntse, “sun”); haplology, or the elimination of one of two identical or similar syllables (znamenosets, “standard-bearer,” from znamenonosets); the contraction of two contiguous vowels into one (Russian dialectal byvat from byvaet, “it happens”); apheresis, or the dropping of the initial vowel of a word after the final vowel of the preceding word (English I’m for lam); elision, or the dropping of the final vowel of a word before the initial vowel of the following word (French I’ami for le ami, “friend”); epenthesis, or the insertion of sounds (the vulgar Larivon for “Larion”; radivo for “radio”), and metathesis, or transposition (Russian Frol from Latin Florus).