Portmanteau
From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.
Portmanteau has two meanings. It can refer to a travelling case or to a word formed by combining two or more words.
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Travelling case
A portmanteau (plural portmanteaus or portmanteaux) is a large travelling case made of leather. These cases consist of two halves that are connected with a hinge.
Portmanteau words
Common usage
In the more common usage of the term, a portmanteau word (sometimes called a blend or frankenword) is a word that is formed by combining two or more words. This meaning of the word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.
An example of a portmanteau is smog, a combination of the words smoke and fog. Baseketball is also a portmanteau of the words baseball and basketball because baseketball is a mixture of the two sports. Carroll used such words to humorous effect in his poems, especially Jabberwocky. James Joyce used portmanteau words extensively in Finnegan's Wake. Many corporate brand names, trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are portmanteaux. For example, Wikipedia is a portmanteau made from wiki and encyclopedia, and Wiktionary, one of Wikipedia's sister projects, is a portmanteau of wiki and dictionary.
Technical usage
In linguistics the same term is used in a much more narrow, yet still not clearly defined sense. Most of the examples given above, which content words being creatively combined in ways that (a) rely on similarity of sounds, and (b) often don't respect their morphological structure (the way they are formed up from smaller meaningful parts). Linguists usually call these words blends. The term portmanteau is reserved for cases where we have a single word that "ought to be" two separate function words. This is a somewhat informal technical term, so a more precise definition is not really possible.
The use of the word is best illustrated by a textbook example: preposition + article combinations in French. The definite articles in French are the following:
- le (masculine singular)
- la (feminine singular)
- l' (singular, in front of a vowel)
- les (plural)
Using the preposition de "of" in French, it is possible to say de la femme "of the woman" and de l'homme "of the man", but neither *de le Président "of the President" nor *de les personnes "of the persons". The latter two must be said as du Président and des personnes. The boldfaced words du and des are portmanteaus in the narrow sense of linguistic theory; the single word du corresponds to two function words, a preposition and an article.
See also
de:Kontamination fr:Mot-valise hu:Szóösszerántás
