Crasis (; from the Greek , ); cf. , "I mix" ''wine with water''; '' kratēr'' "mixing-bowl" is related. is a type of contraction in which two vowels or diphthongs merge into one new vowel or

diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

, making one word out of two ( univerbation). Crasis occurs in many languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; it was first described in

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...

. In some cases, as in the French examples, crasis involves the grammaticalization of two individual lexical items into one. However, in other cases, like in the Greek examples, crasis is the orthographic representation of the encliticization and the

vowel reduction In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic ''quality'' of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word (e.g. for the Muscogee language), and which ar ...

of one grammatical form with another. The difference between them is that the Greek examples involve two grammatical words and a single

phonological word The phonological word or prosodic word (also called pword, PrWd; symbolised as ω) is a constituent in the phonological hierarchy. It is higher than the syllable and the foot but lower than intonational phrase and the phonological phrase. It i ...

, but the French examples involve a single phonological word and grammatical word.

Greek

In both

Ancient Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history through late antiquity. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the development of Sumerian cuneiform script. Ancient h ...

and

Modern Greek Modern Greek (, or , ), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the language sometimes referred to ...

, crasis merges a small word and long word that are closely connected in meaning. In Ancient Greek, a coronis ( ''korōnís'' "curved"; plural ''korōnídes'') marks the vowel from crasis. In ancient times, it was an apostrophe placed after the vowel (), but it is now written over the vowel () and is identical to

smooth breathing The smooth breathing (; ''psilí''; ) is a diacritical mark used in polytonic orthography. In Ancient Greek, it marks the absence of the voiceless glottal fricative from the beginning of a word. Some authorities have interpreted it as repr ...

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

. (For instance, uses the character ; ''psili'' means smooth breathing.) Unlike a coronis, smooth breathing never occurs on a vowel in the middle of a word although it occurs in a doubled

rho Rho (; uppercase Ρ, lowercase ρ or ; or ) is the seventeenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 100. It is derived from Phoenician alphabet, Phoenician letter resh . Its uppercase form uses the same ...

: ''pyrrhos''. The article undergoes crasis with nouns and adjectives that start with a vowel: * → "my (affairs)" * → "on the contrary" * → "the same" * → (plural of the previous example) καί undergoes crasis with the first-person singular pronoun and produces a long vowel: * → "and I", "I too" * → "and to me" In the modern monotonic orthography, the coronis is not written.

Italian

In Italian, crasis occurs between the prepositions , , , , , , and the singular masculine definite article or in fewer cases with the plural masculine definite articles and . * → * → * → * → * → * → * → * → (archaic) * → (archaic) * → (archaic)

French

In French, the contractions of determiners are often the results of a vocalisation and a crasis: * → , → * → , → * → (archaic) In colloquial Québécois French, crasis extends to form further words. * à + la → à * sur + la → s'a * sur + les → s'es * il + est → yé

Portuguese

The most frequently-observed crasis is now the contraction of the preposition ("to" or "at") with the feminine singular definite article ("the"), indicated in writing with a

grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...

or the masculine singular definite article (also "the"). For example, instead of ("I go to the beach"), one says ("I go to-the beach"). The contraction turns the

clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...

into the stressed word . Meanwhile, a person going to a bank, a supermarket or a marketplace would say respectively , or . Crasis also occurs between the preposition and

demonstrative Demonstratives (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic, their meaning ...

such as when the preposition precedes , (meaning "that", "those", in different genders), which contract to , . The accent marks a secondary stress in Portuguese. In addition, the crasis is pronounced lower as than the article or preposition , as , in the examples in standard

European Portuguese European Portuguese (, ), also known as Lusitanian Portuguese () or as the Portuguese (language) of Portugal (), refers to the dialects of the Portuguese language spoken in Portugal. The word "European" was chosen to avoid the clash of "Portugues ...

, but the qualitative distinction is not made by most speakers in

Brazilian Portuguese Brazilian Portuguese (; ; also known as pt-BR) is the set of Variety (linguistics), varieties of Portuguese language native to Brazil. It is spoken by almost all of the 203 million inhabitants of Brazil and widely across the Brazilian diaspora ...

(some dialects, like

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, or simply Rio, is the capital of the Rio de Janeiro (state), state of Rio de Janeiro. It is the List of cities in Brazil by population, second-most-populous city in Brazil (after São Paulo) and the Largest cities in the America ...

's , are exceptions and make the distinction). Crasis is very important since it can change the meaning of a sentence: * - The police is exposed * - She is exposed to the police * - Glória the queen (In this case, "Glória" is a proper noun). * - Glory to the queen (It can be spoken in the imperative with a different intonation. Glory to the Queen can mean that people are "ordering" that "Glory", a proper noun, be the queen.) * - Give the woman * - Give to the woman These rules determine whether crasis always applies or whether one may use the contraction (with an accent) instead of the preposition (without an accent): Replace the preposition by another preposition, as ("in") or ("to"). If after replacement, the definite article ("the") is still possible, crasis applies: * : with a grave accent because it equivalent to "Pedro traveled 'to the' Northeast Region". Here, could also be used. * : without a grave accent in Brazilian Portuguese because it is equivalent to "The author dedicated the book 'to' his wife". A consistent use, according to the rules in

Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...

would not allow to be used instead. In European Portuguese, the rules are different, and it is , but in English, both sentences have the same meaning. If the nominal complement is changed after "a" from a feminine noun to a masculine noun, and it is now necessary to use 'ao' as used naturally by native speakers, crasis applies: * , : with a grave accent because if the object is changed to a masculine noun ("Prestou relevantes serviços ao povo" ), "ao" ("to asculinethe") is now used. * "Chegarei daqui a uma hora" : without crasis because when the feminine noun is changed to a masculine noun ("Chegarei daqui a um minuto" ), there is no "ao" (as "um/uma", indefinite articles, appear instead of "o/a"). The grave accent is never used before masculine words (nouns, pronouns, etc.); verbs; personal pronouns; numerals, plural nouns without the use of the feminine plural definite article ("the"); city names that do not use a feminine article; the word ("house") if it has the meaning of one's own home; the word ("earth") when it has the meaning of soil; and indefinite, personal, relative or demonstrative pronouns (except the third person and or ); between identical nouns such as "day by day", "everyday", "daily life", "dropwise", "drip", and "face to face"; and after prepositions. Here are some exceptions: * (It is necessary to declare war on war!) * (It is necessary to give more life to life.) Crasis also occurs between the prepositions , and and the definite articles. * → * → * → * → * → * → * → * → * → * → * → * →

Optional crasis

The grave accent is optional in the following cases: * Before a female's first name *: (I am referring to Fernanda.) * Before a feminine possessive pronoun *: (Go to your wnfarm.) * After the preposition *: (Go by that door.) *: (I traveled to

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

by car.)

Spanish

In Spanish, crasis occurs between the prepositions or and the masculine definite article . * → * →

Greek

Italian

French

Portuguese

Optional crasis

Spanish

See also

Notes and references

Notes

References

External links