30 Examples of Artificial Hiatus

Artificial hiatus

The linguistic phenomenon by which a notorious sound break is created in a succession of letters or phonemes, associated with the meeting of certain vowels that could make up a syllable, is known as hiatus.

What happens with the hiatus and that forces the syllable to split or break is the succession of certain vowels that form diphthongs. But not just any diphthong produces the call artificial hiatus: this is generated only in the case that two vowels coincide, one open and one closed, and that the accentuation is fixed on the closed vowel.

Let us remember that the closed vowels are 'i' and 'u', and the open vowels are 'a', 'e' and 'o', and that a diphthong is formed by the coincidence of two vowels in the same syllable, whatever these may be.. It is not relevant in an artificial hiatus if the open vowel is located first and then the closed one or vice versa, the essential thing is that the pronunciation forces the break, generating a new syllable of one or more letters.

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Examples of artificial hiatus

The following list includes thirty words with artificial hiatus, as an example; those with first the open vowel and then the closed vowel (-ai, -ei, -oi, -au, -eu, -ou), and lastly those with the closed vowel first (-ia, -ie, -io, -ua, -ue, -uo). The artificial hiatus is underlined.

Natural hiatuses

The artificial hiatus opposes the natural hiatus, which is the one occurs withthe meeting of two open vowels, which can be different or the same repeated. The hiatus always forces the separation into syllables, whether it is a natural hiatus or an artificial hiatus.

The separation between artificial and natural hiatuses is not always relevant. However, the concept that natural gaps will or will not be marked according to the general accentuation rules, while artificial gaps will do so in any case. This causes that on certain occasions, artificial hiatuses force words to move apart spelling rules, as happens, for example, with verbs in the conditional tense ('to sellíTo sewía ’): the second-to-last syllable is stressed and the word should not have an accent (because it is a serious word ending in a vowel), but it does, precisely, because of the artificial hiatus that is created.

The artificial hiatus acquires particular importance inpoetry, because in view of the need to build rhymes and metrics, the number of syllables of the words that the verses contain and the loudness of the finishes are essential allies to achieve the aesthetics and harmony required in this genre literary. Another interesting detail is that the artificial hiatus is maintained, even if there is an ax ('h') between the closed and the open vowel, since being a silent letter it does not affect sound issues.