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An example of historical elision in French that began at the phrasal level and became lexicalized is preposition de > d' in aujourd'hui "today", now felt by native speakers to be one word, but deriving from au jour de hui, literally "at the day of today" and meaning "nowadays", although hui is no longer recognized as meaningful in French. In ...
Elision is the loss of unstressed sounds, aphaeresis the loss of initial sounds, syncope is the loss of medial sounds, and apocope is the loss of final sounds. Elision examples: in the southeastern United States, unstressed schwas tend to drop, so "American" is not /əˈmɛɹəkən/ but /ˈmɚkən/. Standard English is possum < opossum.
In French, elision (élision) is the suppression of a final unstressed vowel (usually /ə/) immediately before another word beginning with a vowel or a silent h . The term also refers to the orthographic convention by which the deletion of a vowel is reflected in writing, and indicated with an apostrophe .
In languages like French, elision removes the end syllable of a word that ends with a vowel sound when the next begins with a vowel sound, in order to avoid hiatus, or retain a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel rhythm. [2] These poetic contractions originate from archaic English. By the end of the 18th century, contractions were generally looked ...
For example, a nominative is described as having apocope of the final vowel, but the genitive does not have it. Throughout its history, however, the genitive case marker has also undergone apocope: Estonian linn ("a city") and linna ("of a city") are derived from linna and linnan respectively, as can still be seen in the corresponding Finnish word.
For example, in educate, the /dj/ cluster would not usually be subject to yod-dropping in General American, as the /d/ is assigned to the previous syllable, but it commonly coalesces to [dʒ]. Here are a few examples of yod-coalescence universal in all English dialects: /tj/ → [tʃ] in most words ending -ture, such as nature [ˈneɪtʃəɹ]
Elision also occurred in Ancient Greek, but in that language, it is shown in writing by the vowel in question being replaced by an apostrophe, whereas in Latin elision is not indicated at all in the orthography, but can be deduced from the verse form. Only occasionally is it found in inscriptions, as in scriptust for scriptum est. [62]
Robert Bridges's theory of elision is a theory of elision developed by the poet Robert Bridges, while he was working on a prosodic analysis of John Milton's poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Bridges describes his theory in thorough detail in his 1921 book Milton's Prosody.