consonant mutation
Initial letter change
Consonant mutation is a change in the initial consonant of a word based on grammatical context.
Common in Celtic languages like Welsh and Irish, where a word's first sound shifts depending on what precedes it—the word for "cat" might begin differently after "my" than after "the." The Welsh word for Wales, Cymru, mutates to Gymru in certain phrases.
- historical phonologyStudy of sound changes
- assimilationAbsorbing into a whole
- metathesisSound reordering in words
- spirantizationConsonant becoming fricative
- inflectionWord form alteration
elision · voicing · nasalization · pluralization · derivation · Celtic languages · alternation · Welsh · strengthening · radical · medial · Irish · grammatical · initial · Celtic · trigger · Grimm · softening
- sound changesassimilation, elision, deletion, voicing, nasalization
- Romance languagesSpanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian
- vowel changesablaut, umlaut, vowel lengthening, Great Vowel Shift, monophthongization
- word formationaffixes, affixation, roots, infix, morphemes