Esperanto · Chapter 18 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Poetic Esperanto: elision and the apostrophe
How verse bends the rules without breaking them: la -> l', the elided noun -o (en rond', el mond'), where elision is forbidden, scansion off the fixed stress, and why good poets dodge adasismo rhymes.
The short version
Rule 16 licenses two elisions and no third
A singular noun may drop its final -o for an apostrophe (mond', kor', homar'), and la may drop its -a (de l' espero). That is every apostrophe in every Esperanto poem you will ever read. Never -on, never -oj, never a verb ending, never an adjective's -a: you may drop a letter that tells the reader what they already know, and never one that carries grammar. Note that l' leans backwards onto the vowel before it, so de l' is sung as one syllable, del.
Al la mond' eterne militanta
Rhyming on an ending alone is called adasismo
Every Esperanto noun ends -o and every past tense -is, so rhymes are free and therefore worthless: kantanta with amanta, vidis with aŭdis, kantado with dancado. The test is whether the rhyme reaches back into the root. Rondo with mondo is real, because -ond- is root material, and Zamenhof's nazon with vazon rhymes on -az- with the -on along for the ride. Nobody will tell you the poem is ungrammatical. They will tell you it was easy.
rondo / mondo, sed kantanta / amanta
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