 In Italian, syllabification rules were preserved instead by vowel-final articles, thus feminine "spada" as "la spada", but instead of rendering the masculine "*il spaghetto", "lo spaghetto" came to be the norm.Though receding at present, Italian once had a prosthetic if a consonant preceded such clusters, so that 'in Switzerland' was "in" "Svizzera".Some speakers still use the prothetic productively, and it is fossilized in a few set locutions such as "in ispecie" 'especially' or "per iscritto" 'in writing' (although in this case its survival may be due partly to the influence of the separate word "iscritto" < Latin "īnscrīptus").