Crasis is the contraction of a vowel or diphthong at the end of a word with a vowel or diphthong at the start of the following word. It occurs, for example, in Portuguese, Arabic, and Greek. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Syneresis. ... “Arabic” redirects here. ...

Portuguese

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In Portuguese, the most frequent crasis is the contraction of the preposition a ("to" or "at") with the feminine singular definite article a ("the"), indicated in writing with a grave accent. For example, instead of *Vou a a praia ("I am going to the beach"), one says Vou à praia ("I am going to-the beach"). This contraction turns the clitic a into the stressed word à. Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), French, Catalan, Welsh, Italian, Vietnamese, Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, Portuguese and other languages. ... In linguistics, a clitic is an element that has some of the properties of an independent word and some more typical of a bound morpheme. ...

Crasis also occurs between the preposition a and demonstratives: for instance, when this preposition precedes aquele, aquela (meaning "that one", with different genders) or aqueles, aquelas (plural), they contract to àquele, àquela, àqueles, àquelas. In this case, the accent marks a secondary stress. // Demonstratives are deictic words (they depend on an external frame of reference) that indicate which entities a speaker refers to, and distinguishes those entities from others. ... The secondary stress is the degree of stress weaker than a primary accent placed on a syllable in the pronunciation of a word. ...

In addition, the vowel à is pronounced lower than the vowel a in these examples in standard European Portuguese, though this qualitative distinction is generally not made in Brazilian Portuguese. In phonetics, vowel height refers to the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth in a vowel sound. ... Brazilian Portuguese (Português Brasileiro in Portuguese) is the group of dialects of Portuguese written and spoken by virtually all the 190 million inhabitants of Brazil and by a couple million Brazilian immigrants, mainly in the United States, Portugal, Canada, Japan, and Paraguay. ...

References

• Greek Grammar
• Crasis in Koine Greek at WikiChristian

See also

• Assimilation (linguistics)
• Contraction (grammar)
• Elision
• Liaison (linguistics)
• Sandhi
• Synaeresis