# Apocope



## RedNitz

Hi! I'm currently writing my BA thesis on Dutch and I would like to confront what I've learned with the reality. I have problem with apocope, a process of dropping the last sound or sounds of a word in pronunciation. I found a piece of information that this process occurs in the Dutch language, but I have problems with confirming it. I'm particularly concerned with a synchronic approach to the problem and a deletion of the schwa sound. I would really appreciate your help.


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## HKK

If I understand you correctly, you are referring to apocope of the schwa. I don't believe that occurs in the standard pronunciation of Dutch. Final schwa is quite important, because it makes the difference between singular and plural for substantives and verbs:
flower - flowers
bloem - bloemen
[blum] - [blumə]
While it does have a grammatical function for adjectives as well, it does seem to be more vulnerable there. In my local variant (but not in standard pronunciation!) you may hear:
a good telephone
een goeie telefoon
[ən ɣuj telefo.n] "goei"

However if you are asking about any kind of apocope, then I can refer you to a number of threads about deletion of final -N for plurals in Dutch. 1 2. This is by far the most frequent apocope in Dutch.


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## Joannes

RedNitz, could you make it a bit more concrete what it is you have learned and would like to confront with reality? Examples would be helpful.


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## RedNitz

> If I understand you correctly, you are referring to apocope of the schwa. I don't believe that occurs in the standard pronunciation of Dutch.


Thank you for your answer. Your hints are very helpful.



> RedNitz, could you make it a bit more concrete what it is you have learned and would like to confront with reality? Examples would be helpful.


Hi. I have learned a bit about final [n] deletion and about apocope in the Middle Dutch (but this is of no interest to me, I'm concerned with Modern Dutch). I also found something about e-apocope (e.g. steene > steen) in Hollandic Dutch, but not in Southern dialects like Flemish.
I assume that the sound here is schwa, not [e], as it is in, for example, "Belgie"  (I have no pronunciation dictionary). However, in the dictionary (I use mijnwoordenboek.nl) there is no entry for "steene", so I've thought it is dialectal...


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## Joannes

RedNitz said:


> I also found something about e-apocope (e.g. steene > steen) in Hollandic Dutch, but not in Southern dialects like Flemish.


That's true for Flemish proper (i.e. Flemish in the linguistic dialectal sense not in the current geographical sense pertaining to the Flemish Region in the federal state of Belgium). In West-Flemish dialects for example the following words have a shwa at the end, while the Standard Dutch version (between brackets) doesn't..
tale (taal), plante (plant), stove (stoof), fore (foor), spellinge (spelling), schole (school), straffe (straf)

To some extent there may also be more relics in Brabantic than in Hollandic, but I doubt about Limburgish..

There is no large scale synchronic shwa apocope that I know of (or that I can think of at the moment), the best known is probably the dropping of final /n/ after shwa, as HKK mentioned..


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## RedNitz

Thank you very much for your help.

Oh, and one more thing. Do you have a process called aphaeresis in Dutch? It's a deletion of a vowel in a word-initial position, as in colloquial English _'bout_. I've read that there are Dutch words which start with schwa.


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