Elision in English Language and Phonetics

Elision in English Language and Phonetics In phonetics and phonology, elision is the omission of a sound (a phoneme) in speech. Elision is common in casual conversation. More specifically, elision may refer to the omission of an unstressed vowel, consonant, or syllable. This omission is often indicated in print by an apostrophe. Verb: elide. Etymology is from the Latin, to strike out. Examples and Observations Elision of sounds can . . . be seen clearly in contracted forms like isnt (is not), Ill (I shall/will), whos (who is/has), theyd (they had, they should, or they would), havent (have not) and so on. We see from these examples that vowels or/and consonants can be elided. In the case of contractions or words like library (pronounced in rapid speech as /laibri/), the whole syllable is elided. (Tej R Kansakar, A Course in English Phonetics. Orient Blackswan, 1998) The Nature of Reduced ArticulationIt is easy to find examples of elision, but very difficult to state rules that govern which sounds may be elided and which may not. Elision of vowels in English usually happens when a short, unstressed vowel occurs between voiceless consonants, e.g. in the first syllable of perhaps, potato, the second syllable of bicycle, or the third syllable of philosophy...It is very important to note that sounds do not simply disappear like a light being switched off. A transcription such as /Ã ¦ks/ for acts implies that the /t/ phoneme has dropped out altogether, but detailed examination of speech shows that such effects are more gradual: in slow speech the /t/ may be fully pronounced, with an audible transition from the preceding /k/ and to the following /s/, while in a more rapid style it may be articulated but not given any audible realisation, and in very rapid speech it may be observable, if at all, only as a rather early movement of the tongue blade towar d the /s/ position. (Daniel Jones, English Pronouncing Dictionary, 17th ed. Cambridge University Press, 2006 From Iced Tea to Ice TeaAn elision is the omission of a sound for phonological reasons ..: cause (also spelled cos, cos, coz) from because; focsle from forecastle; or ice tea from iced tea (in which -ed is pronounced /t/ but omitted because of the immediately following /t/). (John Algeo, Vocabulary, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume IV, ed. by Suzanne Romaine. Cambridge University Press, 1999) From Iced Cream to Ice Cream[Ice cream] is an extremely common term and no one these days, I believe, would be tempted to describe the confection as iced cream - and yet this was its original description. . . . With time, however, the -ed ending eroded. In pronunciation, it would have been swallowed very early and eventually, this was reflected in the way it was written. (Kate Burridge, Gift of the Gob: Morsels of English Language History. HarperCollins Australia, 2011) WannaIn North and South, Mr. [John] Jakes is careful to keep his elisions within quotation marks: Im sure, Capn, says a farmer in his novel, and a stevedore calls a young soldier a sojer boy....Stephen Crane, in his Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, in 1896 pioneered wanna in literature with I didn wanna give im no stuff. The spelling is designed to recreate the way the spoken word pounds, shapes and knocks about the original words. (William Safire, The Elision Fields. The New York Times Magazine, August 13, 1989)