Contraction

Contraction (in Greek συναίρεσις) is a phonetic phenomenon which consists in merging two successive vowels within the same word into a single long vowel. Contraction, like crasis, originated from the need to ease the pronunciation of adjoining vowels, which Greek tended to avoid.

Contraction occurred frequently, for Greek was a highly inflected language: just consider the outcome of so many inflected nouns, adjectives or verbs, whose vowel stems meet with endings beginning with a vowel.

Contraction evolved by degrees in the history of the Greek language: for example, both contracted and still uncontracted forms appear in Homer. Uncontracted forms are frequent also in the Ionic dialect of the Histories by Herodotus. In the Attic dialect, instead, contraction is systematic.

When practicing the language, it will be important:

• to identify contracted forms; e.g.: τιμῶμεν (we honour);

• to trace back the original uncontracted forms; e.g.: τιμά-ομεν;
• to reconstruct the uncontracted headword in order to look it up in a dictionary; e.g.: es. τιμά-ω, I honour.

Remember that headwords are always uncontracted when listed in dictionaries and grammars, in order to allow users to predict contraction outcomes in inflected words. In the works of Attic authors, however, even headwords are contracted (e.g.: the first person singular of the present indicative of verbs). Consequently, the above given example will always be spelled τιμῶ, never τιμάω, in Attic texts.

Keep in mind that the vowel resulting from contraction will carry an accent if either the first or the second uncontracted vowel was accented. In particular, the resulting contracted vowel will carry:

• a circumflex accent if the first of the vowels to be contracted carried an accent; e. g.: φιλέ-ομεν > φιλοῦμεν, we love;

• an acute accent when the second uncontracted vowel was accented; e.g.: τιμα-όμεθα > τιμώμεθα, we are honoured;

instead, if neither of the vowels to be contracted had an accent, the contracted vowel will have no accent; e. g. φίλε-ε > φίλει, love! (imperat.).

The following table shows the outcomes of vowel contraction in inflected words when the word stem ends in a vowel and the inflection ending begins with a vowel: