🚀 go-pugleaf

cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:

>I know that there are languages, like French, that include contractions,
>but I was wondering if there were any around that had OPTIONAL
>contractions, as does English.  "I'm" is just as grammatical as "I am,"
>while "je aime" isn't acceptable.

Why, French has "y" as a contracted form of "lui" e.g. j'y ai dit =
je lui ai dit. It drops "ne" all over the place, e.g. "je sais pas =
je ne sais pas", and more.

I believe that quite a number of languages have contractions galore.
Tolomako (New-Hebrides) regularly drop the initial n of the article
"na", and the personal marker "i" in fast speech, and even has so
quite bewildering "shortspeak", viz  asasaa = ai sa tinisi na.

The Pidgin English  of the Solomon Islands, at least the variety
spoken on Santa Ysabel, also has regular contractions (which the Pidgin
English of the New Hebrides does not have, although they are quite 
close). For instance, you can always omit the last vowel of words
of more than one syllables, drop the homorganic nasal in a nasal+
stop cluster, and reduce two duplicated syllables to one with a
long consonant. 
And what's more, you can cumulate those contractions on top of one
another! For instance:  
bambu (bamboo) --> babu --> bab
putete (sweet potato) --> put:e --> put:
		   or --> putet