Blend word


A blend is a word formed from parts of two or more other words. At least one of these parts is not a morph but instead a mere splinter, a fragment that is normally meaningless:

In , hotel is represented by various shorter substitutes – otel, tel or el – which I shall call splinters. Words containing splinters I shall call blends.

Classification

Blends of two or more words may be classified from each of three viewpoints: morphotactic, morphonological, and morphosemantic.

Morphotactic classification

Blends may be classified morphotactically into two kinds: total and partial.

Total blends

In a total blend, each of the words creating the blend is reduced to a mere splinter. Some linguists limit blends to these : for example, Ingo Plag considers "proper blends" to be total blends that semantically are coordinate, the remainder being "shortened compounds".
Commonly for English blends, the beginning of one word is followed by the end of another:
Much less commonly in English, the beginning of one word may be followed by the beginning of another:
Some linguists do not regard beginning+beginning concatenations as blends, instead calling them complex clippings, clipping compounds or clipped compounds.
Unusually in English, the end of one word may be followed by the end of another:
A splinter of one word may replace part of another, as in three coined by Lewis Carroll in "Jabberwocky":
They are sometimes termed intercalative blends.

Partial blends

In a partial blend, one entire word is concatenated with a splinter from another. Some linguists do not recognize these as blends.
An entire word may be followed by a splinter:
A splinter may be followed by an entire word:
An entire word may replace part of another:
These have also been called sandwich words, and classed among intercalative blends.

Morphonological classification

Morphonologically, blends fall into two kinds: overlapping and non-overlapping.

Overlapping blends

Overlapping blends are those for which the ingredients' consonants, vowels or even syllables overlap to some extent. The overlap can be of different kinds. These are also called haplologic blends.
There may be an overlap that is both phonological and orthographic, but with no other shortening:
The overlap may be both phonological and orthographic, and with some additional shortening to at least one of the ingredients:
Such an overlap may be discontinuous:
These are also termed imperfect blends.
It can occur with three components:
The phonological overlap need not also be orthographic:
If the phonological but non-orthographic overlap encompasses the whole of the shorter ingredient, as in
then the effect depends on orthography alone.
An orthographic overlap need not also be phonological:
For some linguists, an overlap is a condition for a blend.

Non-overlapping blends

Non-overlapping blends have no overlap, whether phonological or orthographic:
Morphosemantically, blends fall into two kinds: attributive and coordinate.

Attributive blends

Attributive blends are those in which one of the ingredients is the head and the other is attributive. A porta-light is a portable light, not a light-emitting or light portability; light is the head. A snobject is a snobbery-satisfying object and not an objective or other kind of snob; object is the head.
As is also true for attributive compounds, the attributive blends of English are mostly right-headed and mostly endocentric. As an example of an exocentric attributive blend, Fruitopia may metaphorically take the buyer to a fruity utopia ; however, it is not a utopia but a drink.

Coordinate blends

Coordinate blends combine two words having equal status, and have two heads. Thus brunch is neither a breakfasty lunch nor a lunchtime breakfast but instead some hybrid of breakfast and lunch; Oxbridge is equally Oxford and Cambridge universities. This too parallels compounds: an actor–director is equally an actor and a director.
Two kinds of coordinate blends are particularly conspicuous: those that combine synonyms:
and those that combine opposites:
Blending can also apply to roots rather than words, for instance in Israeli Hebrew:
"There are two possible etymological analyses for Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár 'bank clerk, teller'. The first is that it consists of Israeli כסף késef 'money' and the Israeli agentive suffix ר- -ár. The second is that it is a quasi-portmanteau word which blends כסף késef 'money' and Israeli ספר √spr 'count'. Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár started as a brand name but soon entered the common language. Even if the second analysis is the correct one, the final syllable ר- -ár apparently facilitated nativization since it was regarded as the Hebrew suffix ר- -år, which usually refers to craftsmen and professionals, for instance as in Mendele Mocher Sforim's coinage סמרטוטר smartutár 'rag-dealer'."

Lexical selection

Blending may occur with an error in lexical selection, the process by which a speaker uses his semantic knowledge to choose words. Lewis Carroll's explanation, which gave rise to the use of 'portmanteau' for such combinations, was:
Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words... you will say "frumious."

The errors are based on similarity of meanings, rather than phonological similarities, and the morphemes or phonemes stay in the same position within the syllable.

Use

Some languages, like Japanese, encourage the shortening and merging of borrowed foreign words, because they are long or difficult to pronounce in the target language. For example, karaoke, a combination of the Japanese word kara and the clipped form oke of the English loanword "orchestra", is a Japanese blend that has entered the English language. The Vietnamese language also encourages blend words formed from Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary. For example, the term Việt Cộng is derived from the first syllables of "Việt Nam" and "Cộng sản".
Many corporate brand names, trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are blends. For example, Wiktionary, one of Wikipedia's sister projects, is a blend of wiki and dictionary.