2025/04/14 by Lorenzo Filipponio · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Historical and Literary Analyses #Medieval European Literature and History
paper · doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.434
openalex publication_date 2025/04/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/19
Abstract Metaphony is a change in the quality of a stressed vowel caused by a following vowel in the same prosodic word. Diphthongization is the splitting of a monophthong into two parts that still belong to the same syllable. Metaphony and diphthongization are found in almost all Romance languages and varieties. Moreover, diphthongization is one of the possible outputs of a metaphonic input on low-mid stressed vowels: therefore, analyzing these two phenomena completely separately is almost impossible. The analysis of metaphonic and diphthongal patterns in various Romance languages and dialects shows that the patterns vary considerably; the absolute and relative chronology of metaphony and diphthongization may also vary, so that a unified account or explanation for all Romance languages could be misleading. Thus, such diversity may be due to the remarkable instability of stressed mid vowels as a long‑term effect of the Proto‑Romance reconfiguration of the Latin stressed vowel system, which means that the different Romance patterns may ultimately be traced back to the regional diversification of Late Latin.