Apocope
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Sound change and alternation |
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General
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Lenition (weakening)
Consonant gradation
Sonorization (voicing) Spirantization (assibilation) Rhotacism (change of [z] or [d] to [r]) L-vocalization (change of [l] to [w]) Debuccalization (loss of place) |
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Elision (loss)
Apheresis (initial)
Syncope (medial) Apocope (final) Haplology (similar syllables) Fusion Cluster reduction Compensatory lengthening |
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Epenthesis (addition)
Anaptyxis (vowel)
Excrescence (consonant) Prosthesis (initial) Paragoge (final) Unpacking Vowel breaking (diphthongization) |
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Coalescence
Coarticulation Palatalization (before front vowels) Velarization (before back vowels) Labialisation (before rounded vowels) Initial voicing (before a vowel) Final devoicing (before silence) Metaphony (vowel harmony, umlaut) Consonant harmony |
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Cheshirisation (trace remains)
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Sandhi (boundary change)
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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.
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[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")
[edit] Loss of other sounds
- Latin illu[d] > Spanish ello
[edit] Case marker
In the Estonian language and Sami languages, apocopes help explain the forms of grammatical cases. For example, a nominative is described as having apocope of the final vowel, whereas the genitive does not. Throughout its history, however, the genitive case marker has also undergone apocope: 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/. In spoken Finnish, the final vowel is sometimes omitted from case markers.
[edit] Grammatical rule
Some languages have apocopations internalized as mandatory forms. In Spanish, for example, some adjectives that come before the noun lose the final vowel when they precede a noun (mainly) in the masculine singular form. Some adverbs, cardinal and ordinal numbers have apocopations as well.
- Adjectives
- Adverbs
- Mucho ("very") → muy → muy cansado ("very tired")
- Tanto ("so") → tan → tan hermoso ("so beautiful")
- Cardinal numbers
- Uno ("one"/"a"/"an") → un → un niño ("a child")
- Ciento ("hundred") → cien → Cien años de soledad ("One hundred years of solitude")
- Ordinal numbers
- Primero ("first") → primer → primer premio ("first prize")
- Tercero ("third") → tercer → tercer lugar ("third place")
[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 Alexander > Alex and so on with other diminutives
- Spanish fotografía > foto "photography"
- Spanish televisión > tele "television"
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
[edit] References
- Crowley, Terry. (1997) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3rd edition. Oxford University Press.
[edit] External links
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Look up apocope in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
