Blend (linguistics)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blend is the term used in linguistics to describe the formation of a word from parts (often but not necessarily morphemes) of two other words.

[edit] Blends in the media

James Joyce used blends extensively in Finnegans Wake. Many corporate brand names, trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are blends. For example, Wikipedia is a blend made from wiki and encyclopedia, and Wiktionary, one of Wikipedia's sister projects, is a blend of wiki and dictionary. Also, Nabisco is a blend of the initial syllables of National Biscuit Company.

In the 21st Century, tabloid writers often blend the first names of famous couples. Some examples include Bennifer (for both Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, and Affleck and Jennifer Garner) and TomKat (for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes).

[edit] Formation

Most blends are formed by one of the following methods:

Part of the sounds of both components are mixed in a "creative" way, mostly preserving their order, such as slithy, a blend of lithe and slimy. This method was preferred by Lewis Carroll but is not much in use otherwise.
The beginning of one word is prepended to the end of the other, e.g., breakfast + lunch = brunch. Sometimes the letter/sound at the boundary is common to both components, e.g., smoke + fog = smog. This is the most common method of blending.
Both components contain a common sequence of letters or sounds. The blend is composed of the beginning of the first component, the common part and the end of the second component. This is a less frequent kind of blend. For example, the word Californication, popularized by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, sounds as if it were California + fornication.
Some languages, like Japanese, encourage the shortening and merging of borrowed foreign words (as in gairaigo), because they are long or difficult to pronounce in the target language. For example, karaoke, a combination of the Japanese word kara (meaning empty) and the clipped form oke of the English loanword "orchestra" (J. ōkesutora オーケストラ), is a Japanese blend that has entered the English language. (From the article gairaigo.)