Poetic Esperanto: Elision, Stress and What Verse Can Bend

Rule 16 of the Fundamento allows two elisions: a noun may drop its final -o, and the article la may drop its -a. An apostrophe marks the gap. The rule covers nothing else, and the stress never moves.

You meet these apostrophes in the anthem and the old songs. The song lessons lean on this page.

Rule 16: two elisions

The Fundamento's own English version of the rule:

The a of the article, and final o of substantives, may be sometimes dropped euphoniae gratia ... in such cases an apostrophe should be substituted for the discarded vowel.

Euphoniae gratia means for the sake of sound. In practice that means verse, where a poet is counting syllables:

It is always optional. De la espero is not worse Esperanto than de l' espero; it is one syllable longer. And it costs nothing: by the time you hear mond in a line, you already know it is a noun.

What Rule 16 does not cover

The rule takes a FINAL vowel, and only on a noun or la. Every other ending carries grammar:

So la mond' can never be the object (La Espero has it after a preposition: al la mond'). To say I see the world, you need the whole word:

• Mi vidas la mondon. - I see the world.

Tio ends in -o but is a correlative, not a noun, so ti' is not standard. PMEG notes that poets occasionally use such forms anyway; in your own writing, leave tio whole.

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

What to do next

1. Read La Espero and find its four apostrophes.
2. Sing Ho, mia kor' and mark every elided word.
3. Then read rhyme and metre for counting the lines.

See also

• Rhyme and metre - counting syllables, strong line endings and adasismo.
• La Espero - Zamenhof's anthem, with de l' espero and al la mond'.
• La Tagiĝo - Grabowski's song, with fratar', mar' and rond'.
• Ho, mia kor' - an elision in the title of one of the first Esperanto poems.
• The accusative - the -n that elision never touches.
• The article la - the word whose -a Rule 16 lets you drop.