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

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Tuesday, April 30, 2002, 4:28
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.