apocope

In phonetics, apocope /əˈpɒkəpi/ (Greek apokoptein “cutting off” from apo- “away from” and koptein “to cut”) is the loss of one or more sounds from the end of a word; especially, the loss of an unstressed vowel.

Apocope as a historical sound change

In historical phonetics, the term "apocope" is often but not always limited to the loss of an unstressed vowel.

Loss of an unstressed vowel (with nasal)

• Vulgar Latin pan[em] > Spanish pan "bread"
• Vulgar Latin lup[um] > French loup "wolf"
• Latin strat[am] > English street

Loss of other sounds

• Latin illu[d] > Spanish ello

Apocope as a case marker

In the Estonian language and Sami language, a phenomenon is seen where apocope explains the forms of grammatical cases. For example, a nominative has apocope of the final vowel but the genitive does not; instead, the genitive case marker has undergone apocope: linn "a city", vs. linna "of a city", historically derived from *linna and *linnan, respectively.

Apocope as a grammatical rule

Some languages have apocopations internalized as mandatory forms. In Spanish, for example, many adjectives that come before the noun lose the final vowel when they precede a noun in the masculine singular form. The word grande (big/great) becomes gran. In this cases, one would say gran aventura (great adventure) rather than grande aventura.

Apocope as a poetic device

• German ich gebe > poetic ich geb' "I give"

Apocope in informal speech

Various sorts of informal abbreviations might be classed as "apocope".

• English photograph > photo
• French réactionnaire > réac "reactionary"
• English animation > Japanese anime-shon > anime
• English synchronization > sync
• English Alexander > Alex and so on with other diminutives

For a list of similar apocopations in the English language, see List of English apocopations. These processes are also linguistically subsumed under a process called truncation.

See also

• Syncope
• Apheresis
• Elision
• Abbreviation
• Acronym
• contraction
• Initialism

External sources

• World Wide Words: Apocope

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