In phonology, apocope (/əˈpɒkəpiː/) is the loss (elision) of one or more sounds from the end of a word, and especially the loss of an unstressed vowel.
Contents
Etymology
Apocope comes from Greek ἀποκοπή apokopḗ from ἀποκόπτειν apokóptein, “cutting off”, from ἀπο- apo-, “away from” and κόπτειν kóptein, “to cut”.
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)
Loss of other sounds
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.
Grammatical rule
Some languages have apocopations internalized as mandatory forms. In Spanish and Italian, for example, some adjectives that come before the noun lose the final vowel or syllable when they precede a noun (mainly) in the masculine singular form. In Spanish some adverbs, cardinal and ordinal numbers have apocopations as well.
Informal speech
Various (and numerous) sorts of informal abbreviations might be classed as apocope:
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 clipping or truncation.