Category talk:Portmanteaus

Shouldn't this category be named "Portmanteaux"? bd2412 T 15:42, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Ah well, this is Wiktionary. Talk pages tend to go unnoticed. But to the point: I think both are acceptable (see portmanteau). &mdash; Vildricianus 11:03, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Reasonable, I suppose, since this is en.wiktionary. bd2412 T 13:38, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia template
The template says that Wikipedia has a Portmanteaus category, but the link in the template leads to a nonexistent page. Was the page deleted? Should the template be removed from this article? B7T 16:02, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Apparently the Wikipedia category was deleted, so I deleted the template on this page. B7T 16:10, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Incorrect usage of Portmanteau words
Many of these words listed are compounds or blends. Portmanteau require there to be a large percentage of letters to overlap. Most of these words lack that requirement 75.105.13.17 03:12, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Deletion debate
is an etymology-section template: displays as:

and categorizes in category:Portmanteaus. The explanation for this discrepancy in terminology is explained at template talk:blend as follows:


 * "Blend" is the correct linguistic term for a word made by merging two words. The word "portmanteau" refers to a blend in which the meanings of the words are merged as as well as the words themselves, and so is more restrictive than "blend".


 * This template is used for all blends, so it should not be renamed "Template:Portmanteau".


 * The category is "Category:Portmanteaus" because this was in use before this template was created.

Be that as it may, the discrepancy is a problem: if the template is to be used for all blends — as its name and documentation both indicate — then it shouldn't categorize into Portmanteaus. That's true especially if — as is claimed — a portmanteau is a type of blend, but even if a portmanteau is a blend: we still shouldn't use two terms.

Another issue: Since the category is for a type of word, like category:English nouns and English back-formations, I it should have a name starting with English.

So I suggest as follows:
 * 1) Recategorize entries calling template:blend by editing the template. The new category will be category:English blends; for foreign words, French blends or whatever.
 * 2) Any extant words in cat:Portmanteaus will then be examined to see whether they are in fact portmanteaus, blending semantics in addition to morphology. Those that are not will be moved to cat:English blends (and forced to use the template, if possible).
 * Cat:Portmanteaus — now containing only "real" portmanteaus — will then be examined for size. If it's useless, it will be deleted, with entries moved into cat:English blends. If it's useful, it will be made a subcat of Blends (with the language structure mirroring that of category:Back-formations, say), and, if possible, template:blend will be modified to allow a Boolean portmanteau parameter for use on portmanteaus, which categorizes correctly.

Thoughts?—msh210 ℠  23:21, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Sounds sensible – may be useful to have some idea of the size of the categories.
 * lists a number of English portmanteaus (blending meaning), so it seems a legit category, and note that there are a massive number of portmanteaus in languages such as Japanese. (See .)
 * —Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 00:51, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

'''Moved from WT:BP. Please continue discussion here, where I suppose it belongs.'''—msh210 ℠  04:52, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Seeing no objection on BP or here, I've modified template:blend and created category:Blends and some of the language categories. I'll wait for the queue to catch up and see what's left in category:Portmanteaus. &#x200b;  —msh210  ℠  16:35, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I worry, though, that some foreign words use without specifying a language, so that they will now be categorized as English blends. To allay that concern, I have manually looked through the list of template:blend's whatlinkshere and edited any words that looked not to be English. If anyone has any other suggestions on how to deal with this problem (e.g., analyze the database for uses of  in FL sections, which I, for one, don't know how to do), please voice them! (Using CatScan for this isn't working. It didn't find [[תשחץ]] as within depth three of category:Hebrew language using  even though it is and does. Merlissimo said this is because the entries haven't been "touched" since, well, whenever, and is fixing this.)  &#x200b;  —msh210  ℠  17:52, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
 * What exactly are we nominating for deletion here? Mglovesfun (talk) 17:32, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete, bad title as well as these are all English. How about using ? Mglovesfun (talk) 18:12, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Fails RFDO. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:54, 4 January 2010 (UTC)