In phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

, apocope (icon; Greek apokoptein meaning cutting off, from apo- meaning away from and koptein meaning 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) list

Case marker

In the Estonian language

Estonian language

Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...

 and Sami languages

Sami languages

Sami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently and erroneously believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami...

, 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

Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

, the final vowel is sometimes omitted from case markers.

Grammatical rule

Some languages have apocopations internalized as mandatory forms. In Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 and Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

, for example, some adjective

Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....

s that come before the noun

Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...

 lose the final vowel or syllable when they precede a noun (mainly) in the masculine

Grammatical gender

Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

 singular

Grammatical number

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....

 form. In Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 some adverb

Adverb

An adverb is a part of speech that modifies verbs or any part of speech other than a noun . Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentences, and other adverbs....

s, cardinal

Cardinal number

In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number – the number of elements in the set. The transfinite cardinal numbers describe the sizes of infinite...

 and ordinal numbers

Ordinal number (linguistics)

In linguistics, ordinal numbers are the words representing the rank of a number with respect to some order, in particular order or position . Its use may refer to size, importance, chronology, etc...

 have apocopations as well.

• Adjectives
  • Grande (big/great) → gran → gran aventura (feminine
    Grammatical gender
    Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
    
    ) (great adventure. Currently, never grande aventura, except in comparative forms: la más grande carrera)
  • Bueno (good) → buen → buen hombre (masculine
    Grammatical gender
    Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
    
    ) (good man)
• 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
    One Hundred Years of Solitude
    One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
    
    )
• Ordinal numbers
  • Primero (first) → primer → primer premio (first prize)
  • Tercero (third) → tercer → tercer lugar (third place)

Informal speech

Various sorts of informal abbreviations might be classed as apocope:

• English photograph > photo
• French sympathique(s) > sympa meaning nice
• French réactionnaire > réac meaning reactionary
• English animation > Japanese anime-shon > anime
• English synchronization > sync, synch, syncro, or synchro
• English Alexander > Alex and so on with other diminutives
• Spanish fotografía > foto meaning photography
• Spanish televisión > tele meaning 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.

See also

• Abbreviation
  Abbreviation
  An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase...
  
  
• Acronym and initialism
  Acronym and initialism
  Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations formed from the initial components in a phrase or a word. These components may be individual letters or parts of words . There is no universal agreement on the precise definition of the various terms , nor on written usage...
  
  
• Apheresis (linguistics)
• Contraction (grammar)
  Contraction (grammar)
  A contraction is a shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters....
  
  
• Elision
  Elision
  Elision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce...
  
  
• Syncope (phonetics)

External links

• World Wide Words: Apocope