Re: French Puns (was: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful))

Christophe Grandsire wrote:


>Those two words ("mots-valise" as we say in French) are an example of a
common
>French wordgame.
English: portmanteau words.  What a coincidence.

French doesn't have the compounding abilities of English, but
>we like very much this kind of "word-blendings" created on the fly :)) .
I've
>often thought that a language that used this as a common system of
compounding
>would be pretty neat :)) (IIRC Lojban does it a bit).
It has been tried in Bahasa Indonesia, though I think without much permanent
success.   A while back I forwarded a message about the process in
Sundanese, where it does seem to work.  (And students' practice of
sarcastically treating proper names as if they were acronyms-- e.g. Suharto
= "SUdah HARus TObat" 'should have repented')

Apparently at one point the language police were trying to eliminate the
word "bétjak" (now "becak")-- the 3-wheel pedicabs, usually driven by young
men just in from the countryside, lowest of the low on the social scale (but
such leg muscles!!).  (Also, "becak" is said to be a Chinese word)  So we
were supposed to call them "roga" < roda tiga 'wheel three'.  It did not
catch on.