ABSTRACT
Fusion, Herbert (1977a: 144) noted, ‘has long been recognized within the domain of suprasegmental phonology’. And fusion and fission are processes long known in historical linguistics. Jakobson (1931[1990]), for example, defined fission as ‘a phoneme splits into a group of phonemes’ and fusion was described as ‘a group of phonemes is transformed into a phoneme’. Other terms for fusion, some only for these processes in vowels, include: coalescence, coalescent assimilation, contraction, merger, monophthongization, and unification. Terms for fission include: breaking, diphthong-ization, fracture, linearization, split, segmentalization, and unpacking.
