Apocope

In phonology, apocope (pronounced /əˈpɒkəpi/, from the 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, and especially the loss of an unstressed vowel.

[edit] Historical sound change

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

[edit] 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

[edit] Loss of other sounds

• Latin illu[d] > Spanish ello

[edit] Case marker

In the Estonian language and Sami language, apocopes help explain the forms of grammatical cases. For example, a nominative is described as having apocope of the final vowel, while the genitive does not. Historicaly, however, the genitive case marker has also undergone apocope: so linn ("a city") vs. linna ("of a city"), is derived from linna and linnan, respectively. In the genitive form, final /n/, while being deleted, blocked the loss of /a/.

[edit] 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 these cases, one would say gran aventura ("great adventure") rather than grande aventura.

[edit] Poetic device

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

[edit] 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 lotion > lo
• 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.

[edit] See also

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

[edit] References

• Crowley, Terry. (1997) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3rd edition. Oxford University Press.

[edit] External links

Look up Apocope in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• World Wide Words: Apocope