Solving a Romantic Problem: Portmanteau’ed Prepositions
Monday, May 11th, 2009The problem:
In many romance languages, prepositions and articles often form portmanteau morphs, combining to form a single word.1 Some examples include (French) à + le > au, de + le > du, (Catalan) a + el > al, de + les > dels, per + el > pel. Italian has a particularly productive system of portmanteau’ed prepositions and articles… I refer you to the contraction article on Wikipedia.
As I noted a couple weeks ago, however, some combinations do not form portmanteaus.2
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Thanks to Jeremy O’Brien for helping me figure out how to refer to this phenomenon. ↩
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This also relates to the issue of parsing multi-word delimiters, though the argument normalization strategy covered here should reduce the necessity of multi-word delimiters. ↩