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Palatalization means pronouncing a sound nearer to the front of the mouth, making it more like a palatal consonant. The modification can be purely phonological, or it can become lexical if it is absorbed as a historical change.Palatalization is common in many languages. Some English examples are:
- The 't' of "question" and "nature" are pronounced as 'ch', or the 'd' of "soldier" and "procedure" sound like 'j'. As these examples suggest, palatalization in English orthography is often indicated by a following 'i' or 'u'.
- The historical change in pronunciation of the initial sound in Caesar from the /k/ sound in Classical Latin to the familiar /s/ sound in English and some other languages. This change is common when the following vowel is 'e' or 'i'.
Palatalization has played a major role in the history of the Romance, Slavic, and Indic languages, among many others throughout the world.
1 See also
2 References
Bynon, Theodora. Historical Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, 1977. BooksEnthsiast.com (hardback) or BooksEnthsiast.com (paperback).
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