Paca Nokt – Kristnaska Kanto en Esperanto

Why does Esperanto poetry drop the final “-o”?

This Esperanto rendition of “Silent Night” opens “Paca nokt', Sankta nokt'” — not nokto, the dictionary form, but nokt', missing its final letter. This is elizio (elision): in poetry and song, a singular noun’s final -o can be replaced by an apostrophe, mostly to fit the meter. The word simply loses a syllable — Esperanto’s normal, predictable stress pattern doesn’t shift.

The same trick works on the article la, which can shrink to l' before or after a vowel — but the whole device is narrowly scoped: only a singular, nominative-case noun (never a plural or an object form) or la can elide this way, and it’s essentially never used outside poetry and song. Zamenhof used it himself in “Ho, mia kor'” (“Oh, my heart”), usually reckoned the very first literary text ever published in Esperanto.