Apocope

[uh-pok-uh-pee]

In phonology, apocope (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.

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 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/.

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.

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 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.