Epenthetic vowel quality crosslinguistically, with focus on Modern Hebrew

Abstract

Abstract This paper proposes the principle of weakest epenthesis, whereby the quality of the epenthetic vowel is that of the weakest lexical vowel of the language, and weakness is defined phonologically, not phonetically. This principle is first shown to motivate the emergence of [e] as the epenthetic vowel of Modern Hebrew. It is then corroborated by a crosslinguistic survey of 100 languages. Finally, the Modern Hebrew facts are used to illustrate the formalization of this principle using gradient symbolic representations.