In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase.
For example, it has been said that in some dialects of Spanish the word-final -ado, as in cansado (tired) is pronounced /ado/ in citation form but the /d/ is omitted in normal speech, giving "cansao".
More careful description will show that the Spanish phoneme /d/ is usually pronounced as a voiced dental fricative [ð] when it occurs between vowels.
[7] The most extreme possibility is complete elision resulting in a diphthong with no observable consonantal tongue gesture.
[8] In this view, elision is the final stage in lenition or consonant weakening, the last phase of a cline or continuum describable as d > ð > ð̞ > ∅.
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.
[10] In many languages there is a process similar but not identical to elision, called contraction, where common words that occur frequently together form a shortened pronunciation.
Contractions of both sorts are natural forms of the language used by native speakers and are often colloquial but not considered substandard.
In some languages employing the Latin alphabet, such as English, the omitted letters in a contraction are replaced by an apostrophe (e.g., isn't for is not).
[13] There are many examples of poetic contraction in English verse of past centuries marked by spelling and punctuation.
Multiple examples can be seen in lines such as the following from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray, published in 1751: The term deletion is used in some modern work instead of elision.
However, they are by no means mandatory and a speaker or writer may choose to keep the words distinct rather than contract them either as a stylistic choice, when using formal register, to make meaning clearer to children or non-native English speakers, or to emphasize a word within the contraction (e.g.
In non-rhotic accents of English, /r/ is dropped unless it's followed by a vowel, making cheetah and cheater completely homophonous.
Elision of unstressed vowels (usually /ə/) is common in the French language and, in some cases, must be indicated orthographically with an apostrophe.
There are a variety of rules for its occurrence,[18] but the most notable is the loss of trailing consonants in common particles as well as the merger of similar vowel sounds.
Another noteworthy and extremely common example along this line includes the phrase er það ekki?
A common example of internal consonant loss in Icelandic is gerðu svo vel ("here you go", "please"), pronounced gjersovel (the hidden j sound is unrelated to the elision and occurs when a /kʰ/ or /k/ precedes /ɛ, i, ɪ, ai/).
In general, a high vowel (/i/ or /u/) that appears in a low-pitched syllable between two voiceless consonants is devoiced and often deleted outright.
It is considered masculine to elide, especially the final u of the polite verb forms (-masu, desu), but women are traditionally encouraged to do the opposite.
Latin poetry featured frequent elision, with syllables being dropped to fit the meter or for euphony.
[24] Dropping sounds in connected speech by native speakers is very common in this language from Kerala, southern India.
The change of Latin into the Romance languages included a significant amount of elision, especially syncope (loss of medial vowels).
Thus, the Andalusian quejío for quejido ("lament") has entered Standard Spanish as a term for a special feature of Flamenco singing.
Similar distinctions are made with the words bailaor(a) and cantaor(a) as contracted versions of the literal translations for dancer and singer exclusively used for Flamenco, compared to the bailarín and cantante of standard Spanish.
The perceived vulgarity of the silent d may lead to hypercorrections like *bacalado for bacalao (cod) or *Bilbado for Bilbao.
Commonly used words have single consonants or syllables removed in casual speech and it is becoming more acceptable in formal settings due to an increasing understandability and use.
Some widely-used examples are: (The difference between the elision May and the original word Main is the lack of nasalization at the end in the former.)
Elision is a major feature of Welsh, found commonly in verb forms, such as in the following examples: Elision of word-final -f is almost always found in spoken Welsh to the point where the words are spelt with optional final -f in words like gorsa(f), pentre(f) and has been eradicated from the inflected prepositions: arna i, not *arnaf i - 'on me', etc.