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The Attic-Ionic dialects of Ancient Greek underwent a sound change whereby, in a sequence of a long vowel followed by a short vowel, the quantities were switched: -V:V- became -VV:-, e.g. -e:o- > -eo:-.

Has a metathesis of this kind occurred -- or does it occur as a synchronic process -- in any other language?

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  • The only language I have ever heard of where it happened more than rarely is (Proto-)Greek. But it must be hard to spot or notice without someone pointing it out...great question! – Cerberus Oct 8 '13 at 6:09
  • @Cerberus Do you mean you know of sporadic cases of QM in other languages? – TKR Oct 9 '13 at 2:36
  • I intentionally left that bit vague, because the answer will disappoint: I seem to remember reading/hearing about it once or twice as happening in other languages, but I have no idea how or where, sorry. – Cerberus Oct 9 '13 at 4:17
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    You may argue that the -VR- > -RV:- metathesis in South Slavic languages is quantitative in nature. This said, though, I should point out that the Slavic languages had eventually lost its quantitative features and substituted them with qualitative ones. – Newbie Jul 6 '16 at 6:56
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I don't know of any language that has this sort of metathesis in vowels other than Hellenic, and since this has gone unanswered for over five years, I suspect there may not be one. But there are a few related phenomena which are worth mentioning.

Compensatory lengthening is a process that happens in several languages (including Ancient Greek): when a consonant is lost for any reason, the vowel before tends to be lengthened. For example, English "night" originally had a short /i/; when the /x/ after it was lost, the vowel lengthened, giving /i:/ (which became /aj/ in the Great Vowel Shift).

More relevantly, the Littera law ("inverse compensatory lengthening") is a sound change that happened in Latin in the early centuries BC. It's named after the word littera "letters", from earlier lītera; in certain environments, the sequence V:C became VC:. This happened with sonorants as well as plosives, such as flāma > flamma "flames".

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  • I'm not sure that "flamma" is an example of the "littera law". Although "littera"-type alternations seem to be fairly poorly understood, this summmary by Michael Weiss says on page 7 that "flama" is probably just a "defective" spelling, which I understand to mean one where single M is used to write [mː]. The etymological explanations that I've read indicate that the word would be expected to have originally had a geminate; it's supposed to come from complete assimilation of the G in flăg- (as in flagro) to M. – brass tacks Jan 11 '19 at 1:38
  • @sumelic Fair! I was going from this paper but your evidence is convincing. – Draconis Jan 11 '19 at 1:53

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