Prosthesis or prothesis in linguistics and poetry (Greek pro "pre-" + thesis "putting") is the appending of a consonant, a vowel, or a whole syllable in front of a word, usually to facilitate pronunciation. It is a form of metaplasm. Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. ... Poetry (from Ancient Greek: (poiéo/poió) = I create) is traditionally a written art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. ... A consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a closure or stricture of the vocal tract sufficient to cause audible turbulence. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... A syllable (Ancient Greek: ) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. ... A metaplasm is a change to the orthography of a word. ...

The opposite phenomenon is called aphesis. Aphesis, Apheresis, Aphaeresis (from Greek apo- away, and hairein to take) is the removal of an initial, usually unstressed vowel or a syllable of a word. ...

Prothesis in word borrowing/derivation

Prothesis may be a form of word corruption during borrowing from foreign languages or during derivation from protolanguages.

For example, /s/ + stop clusters in Latin gained a preceding /e/ in Old Spanish and Old French; hence, the Spanish word for "state" is "estado," deriving from Latin "status." At first just one of many dialects of Iberian Romance spoken in Iberia, the dialect of Castile eventually became identified as the Spanish language (called español or castellano in Spanish). ... Old French is a term sometimes used to refer to the langue doïl, the continuum of varieties of Romance language spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of Belgium and Switzerland during the period roughly from 1000 to 1300 A.D...

Some Turkic languages avoid certain combinations of consonants at the beginning of a word. Therefore Smyrna is called Izmir in Turkey and "machine" is "amashina" in Abkhaz language. The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China with an estimated 140 million native speakers and tens of millions of second-language speakers. ... For other meanings of Smyrna, see Smyrna (disambiguation). ... Shows the Location of the Province Ä°zmir Izmir from space, June 1996 Izmir (Turkish spelling Ä°zmir, contraction of its former name Smyrna), the second-largest port (after Ä°stanbul) and the third most populous city (2,409,000 in 2000) of Turkey, is located on the Aegean Sea near the Gulf... Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken in Georgia and Turkey. ...

In some dialects of Nenets language, the initial syllable cannot start with a vowel, therefore when borrowing the initial nasal consonant prothesis ng [ŋ] is used. Nenets (autonym: ненёця вада) is a language spoken by the Nenets people in northern Russia. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... A nasal consonant is produced when the velum—that fleshy part of the palate near the back—is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. ...

Hindi borrowing from English words with initial i; sp-, sk- or sm- clusters: school → iskuul, special → ispesal. Hindi (हिन्दी hind), an Indo-European language spoken mainly in North, Central, and West India, is the official language of the Indian Union. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...