Svarabhakti

As I grow older there are a lot of things from the past that I forget. Some things disappear completely. Some things hang around like very thin threads that make me almost remember them, but not quite.

For many months, perhaps years, I have wondered about one word that has been bouncing around like a rubber ball in my brain every now and then. I did not remember exactly what it sounded like, so it was impossible to search for it on the world wide thingummy.

Today, finally, the word became clear enough for me to find it: svarabhakti.

In case you also go around and wonder what it is about, here is what I found out:

A svarabhakti is a vowel that is inserted between two consonants. One example would be if you pronounce blue really slowly: be-lueue. The e between b and l is a svarabhakti. In many languages a large number of words have svarabhakti, like German, Dutch, many Celtic languages and Icelandic. It is difficult to find an Icelandic text without any words with the suffix -ur, and the u in -ur is a hundreds of years old svarabhakti. The word maður used to be maðr, but the Icelanders gave up pronouncing the tricky consonant combination ðr and added the u to make things easier.

The word svarabhakti comes from Sanskrit. Svara (स्वर) means sound, vowel. The word bhakti (भक्ति ), on the other hand, belongs to those words that can mean about anything: devotion, fidelity, order, part and division. The logic of the full word is "a vowel that divides" [two consonants from each other].

Other words for the same thing are epenthesis (ἐπένθεσις, from επι, on + εν, in + θεσις, placement) and anaptyxis (ανάπτυξής, growth).

At least that's what the internet tells me. However, it is unable to tell me where and when in the past I had seen the word before.