While Western Romance words fused the prosthetic vowel with the word, but cognates in Eastern Romance and southern Italo-Romance didkept not,them e.gseparate:. Italian ''scrivere'', ''spada'', ''spirito'', ''Stefano'', and ''stato'', Romanian ''scrie'', ''spată'', ''spirit'', ''Ștefan'' and ''stat''. In Italian, syllabification rules were preserved instead by vowel-final articles, thus feminine ''spada'' as ''la spada'', but instead of rendering the masculine ''*il stato'', ''lo stato'' came to be the norm. Though now receding at present, Italian once had a prosthetic {{IPA|/i/}} maintaining /s/ syllable-final if a consonant preceded such clusters,soand thatso 'in Switzerland' was ''in'' {{IPA|[i]}}''Svizzera''. Some speakers still use the prothetic {{IPA|[i]}} productively, and it is fossilized in a few set locutions such as ''in ispecie'' 'especially' or ''per iscritto'' 'in writing' (a form whose survival may have been buttressed in part by the word ''iscritto'' < Latin ''īnscrīptus'').
