Apheresis (phonetics)

Apheresis is the loss of a sound or group of sounds at the beginning of a word.

Summary

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• 1 Introduction
• 2 apheresis
• 3 Types
• 4 Consonant groups of Greco-Latin origin
• 5 Sources

Introduction

The history of languages shows that words change over time.

The change can cause words to lose — or add — some letters. The phenomena that cause the deletion of vowels or consonants of a word are called apheresis , syncope , apocope and haplology . All these processes of phonetic change are part of what is known as metaplasms , which are the transformations or alterations that words undergo due to the addition, deletion or change of the sounds of a word.

Aphaeresis

It is the phenomenon that consists of the elimination of a sound at the beginning of a word.

Types

1. . The one that occurs when one (difficult to intuit if the etymology of the word is not known).
2. . The one that occurs in the language itself.

• Examples of the ^1sttype:

There is also apheresis in the colloquial forms with which we refer to other people (which is called generic vocative):

• quilloor illo (as a child)
• acho(male, very common in Murcia, Spain)
• chacho(as a boy).

It is common to find names in which such deletion occurs at the beginning of the word, such as:

• Sito(from Josito, diminutive of José)
• Jandro(from Alejandro)
• Toño(from Antonio)
• Fina(from Josefina)
• Lupe(from Guadalupe)

Consonant groups of Greco-Latin origin

In the Spelling of the Spanish language it is specified that there are consonant groups of Greco-Latin origin that can be adapted to the spelling of Castilian, p. ex. words beginning with ps-, cn-, gn-, pn-, pt-.

Then there would be apheresis in words like:

• pseudonym(instead of pseudonym)
• psychology(instead of psychology)
• neoraceous(for cnoraceus)
• nome(instead of gnome)
• Ptolemaic(for Ptolemaic)