| content |
| Historical sound change |
|---|
| General |
| Metathesis |
| Dissimilation |
| Fortition |
| Lenition (weakening) |
| Sonorization (voicing) |
| Spirantization (assibilation) |
| Rhotacism |
| Debuccalization (loss of place) |
| Elision (loss) |
| Apheresis (initial) |
| Syncope (medial) |
| Apocope (final) |
| Haplology (similar syllables) |
| Fusion |
| Cluster reduction |
| Compensatory lengthening |
| Epenthesis (addition) |
| Anaptyxis (vowel) |
| Excrescence (consonant) |
| Prosthesis (initial) |
| Paragoge (final) |
| Unpacking |
| Vowel breaking |
| Assimilation |
| Coarticulation |
| Palatalization (before front vowels) |
| Velarization (before back vowels) |
| Labialization (before rounded vowels) |
| Initial voicing (before a vowel) |
| Final devoicing (before silence) |
| Vowel harmony |
| Consonant harmony |
| Cheshirisation (trace remains) |
| Nasalization |
| Tonogenesis |
| Floating tone |
| Sandhi (boundary change) |
| Crasis (contraction) |
| Liaison, linking R |
| Consonant mutation |
| Tone sandhi |
| Hiatus |
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.
Contents |
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
Case marker
In the Estonian language and Sami language, apocopes are used to explain 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.
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.
Poetic device
- German ich gebe > poetic ich geb' ("I give")
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
References
- Crowley, Terry. (1997) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3rd edition. Oxford University Press.
External links
