Nope. That’s different. You’re talking about elision. If the ‘im and ‘er couldn’t exist on its own it might be a clitic.

I don’t think it’s elision. If it were, “I saw’im an’er” for “I saw him and her” would be okay; it’s clearly not. The similar “I saw’im and gave’im a message” is just fine.

The ‘im and ‘er cannot exist on their own, and they are not just phonologically reduced version of the longer pronouns. (There is a British dialect in which “him” is always “im” and “her” is always “er.” As I mentioned, that’s not what I’m talking about here.) We know because English (except for some dialects) doesn’t in general allow initial H’s to be dropped: just think how awful “I saw’erb” is for “I saw Herb.”

Joel, I think your section on clitics is incorrect. A clitic is a morpheme that may attach to the end of other words but can’t appear by itself. ‘s is an example:

It sounds like we agree. What part of my section on clitics seems wrong? One English example is ‘s, but ‘im and ‘er are also clitics. They attach to other words and can’t appear by themselves.

As another example, consider that the answer to “who did you see?” cannot be the clitic “‘er.” It has to be the full pronoun “her.”

The queen’s crown.
The queen of England’s crown.

In Nyungwe we have a clitic -mbo that means something like “also” and attaches to all sorts of things.

I also think that contractions can function differently in different cultures and across languages, so even if Greek abbreviations were the same as contractions, it still wouldn’t necessarily mean that we should use English contractions to represent them.

Still, as a guess, contractions tend to correlate with informality in most languages, but perhaps tautologically so: If we saw a short-form that was formal we might not call it a contraction.

Capturing the formality level of the original is one of the translator’s greatest challenges. In my opinion, most translations either end up with English prose that is much more formal than the Greek was, or with English poetry that is much less formal that the Greek was.