loss of the vowel in the enclitic forms of English is , with subsequent change of to adjacent to a voiceless consonant Frank's not here . Or a small class of elements, such as the assimilation of the of English the, this and that to a preceding (including the of and when the is elided) or : all the often , in the often , and so on. As in these examples, such features are rarely indicated in standard orthography. In a striking exception, Sanskrit orthography reflects a wide variety of such features; thus, tat "that" is written tat, tac, taj, tad, or tan depending on what the first sound of the next word is. These are all assimilations, but medial sequences do not assimilate the same way. Haplology: The loss of a syllable when an adjacent syllable is similar or (rarely) identical. Example: Old English Englaland became Modern English England, or the common pronunciation of probably as . This change usually affects commonly used words. The word haplology itself is sometimes jokingly pronounced "haplogy". Elision, aphaeresis, syncope, and apocope: all losses of sounds. Elision is the loss of unstressed sounds, aphaeresis the loss of initial sounds, syncope is the loss of medial sounds, and apocope is the loss of final sounds. Elision examples: in the southeastern United States, unstressed schwas tend to drop, so "American" is not but . Standard English is possum < opossum. Syncope examples: the Old French word for "state" is estat, but the s disappeared, yielding état. Similarly, the loss of in English soften, hasten, castle, etc. Apocope examples: the final -e in Middle English words was pronounced, but is only retained in spelling as a silent E. In English and were apocopated in final position after nasals: lamb, long . Epenthesis (also known as anaptyxis): The introduction of a sound between two adjacent sounds. Examples: Latin humilis > English humble; in Slavic an -l- intrudes between a labial and a following yod, as *zemya "land" > Russian zemlya (земля). Most commonly, epenthesis is in the nature of a "transitional" consonant, but vowels may be epenthetic: non-standard English film in two syllables, athlete in three. Epenthesis can be regular, as when the Indo-European "tool" suffix *-tlom everywhere becomes Latin -culum (so speculum "mirror" < *speḱtlom, pōculum "drinking cup" < *poH3-tlom). Some scholars reserve the term epenthesis for "intrusive" vowels and use excrescence for intrusive consonants.