Metathesis (linguistics)

Metathesis (/məˈtæθəsɪs/; from Greek , from "I put in a different order"; Latin: trānspositiō) is the rearranging of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence. Most commonly, it refers to the switching of two or more contiguous sounds, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:

Metathesis may also involve switching non-contiguous sounds, known as nonadjacent metathesis, long-distance metathesis, or hyperthesis:

Many languages have words that show this phenomenon, and some even use it as a regular part of their grammar, such as Hebrew and Fur. The process of metathesis has altered the shape of many familiar words in English as well.

The original form before metathesis may be deduced from older forms of words in the language's lexicon or, if no forms are preserved, from phonological reconstruction. In some cases, including English "ask" (see below), it is not possible to settle with certainty on the original version.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a historian and scholar in rhetoric living in 1st century BC Greece. He analysed classical texts and applied several revisions to make them sound more eloquent. One of the methods he used was re-writing documents on a mainly grammatical level: changing word and sentence orders would make texts more fluent and 'natural', he suggested. He called this way of re-writing metathesis.

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