20. Position of the clipped part

1) Final clipping - the beginning of the prototype is retained. It forms the bulk of the class (ad, advert from advertising, coke from coca–cola, fab – fabulous, lab – laboratory, mac- mackintosh, ref - referee, vegs – veggies).

2) Initial clipping – words retaining the final part of the prototype. They are less numerous but much more firmly established as separate lexical units with a meaning very different of that of the prototype (cute – acute, fend - defend, mend – amend, story from history, to tend from attend). Cases like cello – violoncello, to phone – telephone where the curtailed words are stylistical synonyms or even variants of their prototypes are very rare. The process of assimilation of loan words is especially frequent in this group.

3) Shorten words with the middle part of the word left out are equally few. They are divided into 2 groups:

3.1. words with a final-clipped stem retaining the functional morpheme (maths – mathematics, specs – spectacles)

` 3.2. contractions (fancy – fantasy, ma’am – madam).

21. Back formations

Much less commonly we find what are called back formation. (edit – editor) –or is wrongly analysed as a suffix like –er (worker, builder) and is therefore removable. The same with burgle – burglar. Most examples are no longer transparent. It’s difficult to realize that the verb to grovel is a back formation from groveling, (grove – face down + one who does). There are not many of these and except of very recent one like burgle, they are always opaque. They came into the language because the form they came from was itself opaque and open to the wrong analyses.

22. Blending

Creation by blending is also called portmanteau words. There are 2 meanings packed up into one word. In blending parts of 2 familiar words are yoked together (usually the first part of one word and the second of the other), to produce a word which combines the meanings and sound of the old ones. The process of formation is also called telescoping because words seem to slide into one another like sections of a telescope. (smog = smoke +fog, heliport = helicopter + airport, motel = moto + hotel). Sometimes we lose the track of the components of new bland, the original of the word is no longer transparent (Vaseline = Wasser (German) water + elaron (Greek) oil).

23. Acronyms

Acronym (Acros = end + onym = name) is a special type of blending, a typical acronym takes the first sound of each of the several words and makes a new word from those initial sounds. If the resulting word is pronounced like any other word – it is a true acronym.

E.g.: ASCII – American Standard Court of International Interchange. WAC – Women Army Cops. NATO – North-Atlantic Treaty Organization, VAT – Value Added Tax, UNO - United Nations Organization, Laser – light amplification by stimulated emission radiation, wasp – white Anglo-Saxon protestants.

To make an acronym pronounceable we take not initial sound, but the first consonant and the first vowel together (radar = radio detecting + ranging). Sometimes acronyms are based on even larger changes of the words they abbreviate. COMECOM – Council for mutual economical system. FORTRAN – formula translation. There is a half way between blendings and acronyms. Then an acronym becomes fully accepted as a word often comes to be spelt with low case letters (radar).