This book presents for the first time an in-depth historical account of vowel prosthesis in the Romance languages. Vowel prosthesis is a change which involves the appearance of a non-etymological vowel at the beginning of a word: a familiar example is the initial e which appears in the development of Latin sperare to Spanish esperar and French esperer (to hope). Despite its widespread incidence in the Romance languages, it has remained poorly studied. In his wide-ranging comparative coverage, Professor Sampson identifies three main categories of vowel prosthesis that have occurred and...