Project Hail Mary contains many contracted words of varying types. In this beanbag, we will look at a few initial categories and we’ll continue looking at others in future beanbags. We will later also look at which speakers use all these contractions.

One category of contraction is g-dropping where the ‘g’ in a final ‘-ing’ is dropped. While from a spelling perspective, the ‘g’ is omitted, no sound is actually dropped. Rather, the ‘ng’ sound simple becomes ‘n’. Examples in Project Hail Mary are:

Mornin’
comin’
freakin’
Doin’ and doin’

Related is true apocope where the final sound is dropped. Examples in Project Hail Mary are:

Ol’ and ol’

There is also syncope where a sound (often an unstressed vowel) is dropped from the middle of a word. Examples in Project Hail Mary are:

imporn’t
gal’xy
Ma’am
and o’clock

Future beanbags will look at the contraction of ‘not’ and auxiliaries such as ‘will’ and ‘had’.