Haplology (from Greek "simple" and , "speech") is, in spoken language, the elision (elimination or deletion) of an entire syllable or a part of it through dissimilation (a differentiating shift that affects two neighboring similar sounds). The phenomenon was identified by American philologist Maurice Bloomfield in the 20th century. Linguists sometimes jokingly refer to the phenomenon as "haplogy", an autology. As a general rule, haplology occurs in English adverbs of adjectives ending in "le", for example gentlely → gently; ablely → ably.
Haplology (from Greek "simple" and , "speech") is, in spoken language, the elision (elimination or deletion) of an entire syllable or a part of it through dissimilation (a differentiating shift that affects two neighboring similar sounds). The phenomenon was identified by American philologist Maurice Bloomfield in the 20th century. Linguists sometimes jokingly refer to the phenomenon as "haplogy", an autology. As a general rule, haplology occurs in English adverbs of adjectives ending in "le", for example gentlely → gently; ablely → ably.
== Examples == Basque: → ('apple cider') German: → (female 'wizard' or 'magician'; male: der Zauberer; female ending -in); this is a productive pattern applied to other words ending in (spelt) -erer. Dutch: → ('narcissism') French: → ('femininity') English: Old English → Engle lond → England (expected form would be *Engelland) Old English cyning → English king (expected form would be *kinning) morphophonology → morphonology conservativism → conservatism femininism → feminism mononomial → monomial urine analysis → urinalysis Colloquial (non-standard and eye dialect spellings signalled by #): library (RP: ) → #libry particularly → #particuly probably → #probly February → #Febury, #Febuary or #Febr(u)y (compare e.g. Austrian German ) representative → #representive authoritative → #authoritive deteriorate → #deteriate Latin: → ('nurse') → (hence idolatry) Biological Latin: Hamamelididae (disallowed spelling: Hamamelidae) Nycterididae → Nycteridae Anomalocarididae (disallowed spelling: Anomalocaridae) Homeric Greek: () → () ('two-handled pitcher, amphora') () → () ('black with clouds') Arabic: () → () ('you are fighting each other') () → () ('I eat') Spanish: → ('lack of modesty', i.e. the nominal form of , 'immodest') Portuguese: → (aged person, senior) → (feminism) Colloquially in sequences like campo pequeno pronounced like "campequeno" or faculdade de letras pronounced like "faculdadletras". Italian: tragico-comico → tragicomico ('tragicomic') domani mattina → domattina ('tomorrow morning')
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).