1572: German Contractions Apr 4, 2019

There are plenty of contractions in English, but with a few exceptions these are centered around verbs. This is not so in German. In that case, while there are some contractions that involve verbs, some of the most common ones relate to articles—in English those are 'a' and 'the'— so that phrases like 'in das' meaning 'in the' (neuter) becomes 'ins', and 'in dem' also 'in the' (masculine) becomes 'im'. This happens to a number of other prepositions, such as 'an', 'hinter', 'um', 'vor' and so on, but not always consistently. For instance, 'zu der' becomes 'zur' in the feminine and 'zu dem' becomes 'zum' in the masculine and neuter, but 'zu den' only becomes 'den' dialectal varieties of German, such as in Berlin, but it is not considered standard. The reason for this is as much luck as anything else.

For more on dialects, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CM7-BMO3vk&t=243s