Sandhi


Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function of the adjacent words. Sandhi belongs to morphophonology.
Sandhi occurs in many languages, particularly in the phonology of Indian languages, as well as in some North Germanic languages.

Types

Internal and external sandhi

Sandhi can be either
It may be extremely common in speech, but sandhi is typically ignored in spelling, as is the case in English. Sandhi is, however, reflected in the orthography of Sanskrit, 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 as in Tamil and, over time, turn into consonant mutations.

Tone sandhi

Most tonal languages have tone sandhi in which the tones of words alter according to certain rules. An example is the behavior of Mandarin Chinese. When in isolation, tone 3 is often pronounced as a falling-rising tone. When a tone 3 occurs before another tone 3, however, it changes into tone 2, and when it occurs before any of the other tones, it is pronounced as a low falling tone, with no rise at the end. A simple example occurs in the common greeting 你好 nǐ hǎo, normally pronounced ní hǎo.

Examples

Japanese

In Japanese phonology, sandhi is primarily exhibited in rendaku and conversion of つ or く to a geminate consonant, 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, where, most commonly, a terminal on one morpheme results in an being added to the start of the next morpheme, as in 天皇: てん ＋ おう → てんのう ; that is also shown in the spelling.