syncope [Grk ‘cutting off’]

Historical language change: formal collapse of different, originally separate grammatical functions, especially apparent in the case system of various languages, thus the ablative, locative, and instrumental in other Indo-European languages correspond to the dative in Greek, while the functions of the instrumental and, in part, those of the locative are subsumed under the ablative in Latin; in German, the nominative case has assumed the function of the vocative. A result of syncretism is that grammatical categories come to be no longer morphologically marked: for instance, syncretism in the development of English led to the loss of case marking and the stabilization of word order.