Sound change

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Elision

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Elision (yielding elided forms) refers to unmorphologized omissions of sounds from words, often part of a syllable, or an entire syllable, rarely more.

Elided forms are often simpler to pronounce, but are not formalized in writing - you might e.g. pronounce camera as camra but you would still write camera.

Consider the seemingly unusual writing of Gloucester, and subtler cases like Parliament, etc.

(You can probably have technical arguments over whether loanwords have adapted or elided.)

Reasons for elision include easier pronunciation after adoption of somewhat unnaturally pronounced words, easing pronunciation of words before formal adoption, dialectical variation, poetic license (e.g. for keeping the meter in poetry), laziness, or even just drunken slurring.

Some elided forms become accepted spellings over time, through common use; consider contractions like "can't" for "cannot". These are often morphologically recognizable tendencies.

See also

• Ellipsis

Ablaut and umlaut

Ablaut and umlaut are two different phonological mutations, and often refer to vowel changes under inflection.

the umlout, as in the diacritic, is not very related. See diaresis, trema, umlaut.

Ablaut is generally unconditioned, meaning it happens, but does not have a clear phonological condition, or meaning.

For example, various strong verbs in english have alternative forms, like sing, sang and sung; there is no directly obvious reason why they are the forms, and there is no single such pattern among strong verbs.

Umlaut is conditioned - it happens in specific contexts and not in others, meaning it comes from specific rules and is meaningful when interpreting a word.

I suspect the distinction is somewhat gradual.