Portmanteau
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A portmanteau (plural: portmanteaux) (IPA pronunciation: [pɔːtˈmantəʊ]) or blend is a word or morpheme which fuses two or more words or parts of words to give a combined meaning. A folk usage of portmanteau refers to a word formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words (e.g. spork from spoon/fork, "animatronics" from "animation" and "electronics", or "blaxploitation" from "black" and "exploitation"). Typically, portmanteau words are neologisms. One of the most well-known examples is cyborg, a term which is commonly used to refer to a cybernetic organism.
This usage of "portmanteau" has been eliminated in modern linguistics. It has a certain historical currency, but has been superseded by the word "blend" in modern linguistic usage[citation needed]. Words such as those cited below and other words such as "motel", "smog", "brunch", etc. are now called "blends". Morphemes which have more than one meaning are still called portmanteaux.
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[edit] Etymology
This usage of the word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from Jabberwocky, saying, "Well, slithy means lithe and slimy ... You see it's like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word." Carroll often used such words to a humorous effect in his work.
"Portmanteau", from Middle French "porter" (to carry) and "manteau" (a coat or cover), formerly referred to a large travelling bag or suitcase with two compartments, hence the linguistic idea of fusing two words and their meanings into one. "Portmanteau" is rarely used to refer to a suitcase in English any more, since that type of a suitcase has fallen into disuse. In French, the word has the different meaning of "coat hanger", and sometimes "coat rack", and is spelled "porte-manteau". The French word for "Portmanteau" is "mot valise", which translates literally as "suitcase word".
"Portmanteau word" was the original phrase used to describe such words (as listed in dictionaries published as late as the early 1990s), but this has since been abbreviated to simply "portmanteau" as the term (and the type of words it describes) gained popularity.
[edit] General summary
A portmanteau morpheme is a morpheme which fuses two or more grammatical categories (see Fusional language). The classical example of such a morpheme in English is the verbal suffix -s. This particular suffix carries (i.e., ports) at least four distinct inflectional meanings and imparts each of these onto the verb's meaning:
Spanish verb suffixes are also fusional, with very many portmanteaux in the Spanish inflectional system.
A portmanteau word is a word which fuses two function words. This use overlaps a bit with the folk term contraction, but linguists tend to avoid using the latter. Example: In French, à + les becomes aux (IPA: [o]), a single indivisible word which contains both meanings.
Outside linguistics, the words called blends are popularly labeled portmanteaux. The term portmanteau is used in a different, yet still not clearly defined sense, to refer to a blending of the parts of two or more words (generally the first part of one word and the ending of a second word) to combine their meanings into a single neologism. One of the more famous portmanteaux in postmodern Continental philosophy is différance. Coined by Jacques Derrida, différance is a word combining the terms to differ and to defer (in the Saussurean sense) to describe the fractured and eternally-signifying character of language (see deconstruction).
It may be noted that, as some portmanteaux enter the lexicon as words in their own right, a double portmanteau becomes possible: for example, Vog is a portmanteau of Volcanic and Smog, while Smog is itself a portmanteau of Smoke and Fog.
