De l' espero: l' and the stress that stays put

l' leans back

L' is read with the word before it, so it follows a preposition ending in a vowel, such as de, ĉe, tra or pri. De l' sounds like del:

• Sub la sankta signo de l' espero - Under the sacred sign of hope (La Espero)
• Ĝis la bela sonĝo de l' homaro - Until humanity's beautiful dream (La Espero)
• Minacis nin ondoj de l' maro - The waves of the sea threatened us (La Tagiĝo)

The third line matters: maro begins with a consonant, and the elision is still right, because the vowel l' needs is the one in de. La Espero is Zamenhof's; La Tagiĝo is Antoni Grabowski's. Poets occasionally use l' with no preposition before it, but after a vowel is the normal place.

dank' al: the elision in everyday speech

One elision left poetry. Dank' al (thanks to) is danko, a thanks, with its -o dropped:

• Dank' al vi, mi trovis la vojon. - Thanks to you, I found the way.
• Danke al vi, mi trovis la vojon. - the same, with the adverb ending.

Both are common. Anywhere else, an apostrophe in prose looks like verse.

The stress stays put

Esperanto stress falls on the second-last syllable. When a word is elided, the stressed vowel stays where it was, so the elided word ends on it:

That is the poet's reason for eliding. Without it, every word of two or more syllables ends on a weak beat. With it, a line can land hard on its last syllable, as Grabowski's do:

Agordu la brustojn, ho nia fratar',

Por nova, pli vigla jam kanto!

Fratar' (the brotherhood) ends the first line on a stress; kanto ends the second on a weak beat. How the two endings alternate, how to count syllables, and why rhyming on an ending alone (kantanta with amanta) is called adasismo: rhyme and metre.

Mistakes English speakers make