|Sound change and alternation| Cheshirization, or
cheshirisation, is a term coined by James Matisoff to refer to a
type of sound change where a trace remains of a sound that has
otherwise disappeared from a word. The term is a neologism, i.e.
it is not an established scientific term. It is used here to
describe a process that is real but so far has no generally
accepted name. The term rephonologization has sometimes been
used to describe this process; see below. Essentially, a
distinction between two sets of words that was formerly
expressed through one phonological feature (e.g. a particular
sound) is preserved (or partly preserved) through being re-
expressed using a different phonological feature. This typically
occurs through two sound changes: One that introduces a
modification of some sort, conditioned on the presence or
absence of a particular feature, followed by another change that
deletes or changes the conditioning feature. A common example is
Germanic umlaut. In many Germanic languages around 500–7