szinkópa

Szinkópa, or syncope, is a phonological process in which sounds—typically vowels—are deleted from within a word, reducing its syllable count. It is a form of elision, distinct from apocope, which removes sounds at the end of a word. The term comes from the Greek synkopē, meaning “cutting together” or “cutting out.”

Syncope occurs in historical language change and in ongoing speech, often in unstressed positions where pronunciation shifts shorten forms. In poetry and prose, syncope can be used deliberately to meet metrical or rhythmic constraints. In English verse, examples include ne'er (never), e'en (even), o'er (over), and fam'ly (family), which preserve meaning while shortening pronunciation.

In classical languages such as Latin and Greek, syncope was a common feature of meter, where interior vowels were regularly elided to fit the metrical pattern. In many modern languages, syncope also appears in casual speech and dialects, sometimes becoming part of traditional spellings or broader colloquial usage.

Szinkópa thus covers a range of phenomena from historical phonology to stylistic shortening in speech and writing. It interacts with stress placement, syllable structure, and orthography, and it is often discussed together with related processes such as elision and metrical contraction.

Related terms include elision, apocope, and metrical contraction. The study of szinkópa helps explain how words evolve in pronunciation and how poets and speakers manage rhythm across languages.