Elision

Attic more than any other dialect disliked the immediate succession of two vowel sounds in adjoining syllables. To avoid such succession, which often arose in the formation and inflection of words, various means were employed: contraction (48 ff.), when the vowels collided in the middle of a word; or, when the succession occurred between two words (hiatus), by crasis (62 ff.), elision (70 ff.), aphaeresis (76), or by affixing a movable consonant at the end of the former word (134).

Hiatus is usually avoided in prose writers by elision (70 ff.); but in cases where elision is not possible, hiatus is allowed to remain by different writers in different degrees, commonly after short words, such as ὦ, εἰ, ἤ, καί, μή, and the forms of the article.

Aphaeresis (ἀφᾳίρεσις taking away) is the elision of ε at the beginning of a word after a word ending in a long vowel or diphthong. This occurs only in poetry, and chiefly after μή not, ἤ or. Thus, μὴ ᾽νταῦθα, ἢ ᾽μέ, παρέξω ᾽μαυτόν, αὐτὴ ᾽ξῆλθεν. In some texts editors prefer to adopt crasis (62) or synizesis (60). α is rarely elided thus.

Elision.—In elision, oxytone prepositions and conjunctions lose their accent: παρ᾽ (for παρὰ) ἐμοῦ, ἀλλ᾽ (for ἀλλὰ) ἐγώ. In other oxytones the accent is thrown back to the penult: πόλλ᾽ (for πολλὰ) ἔπαθον.

a. Observe that in πόλλ᾽ ἔπαθον the acute is not changed to the grave (154 a, 3). A circumflex does not result from the recession of the accent. Thus, φήμ᾽ (not φῆμ᾽) ἐγώ for φημὶ ἐγώ. τινά and ποτέ, after a word which cannot receive their accent (183 d), drop their accent: οὕτω ποτ᾽ ἦν.