A portmanteau of every word in English (2015) | Hacker News Reader

A portmanteau of every word in English (2015)

cs.cmu.edu

80 pointsluu39 comments

This problem is more tractable than you might think! Some progress on it was printed in the 2016 and 2017 Sigbovik proceedings:

http://sigbovik.org/2016/proceedings.pdf http://sigbovik.org/2017/proceedings.pdf

If this kind of problem appeals to you, please consider participating in http://golf.horse/, a tangentially related challenge that is probably going to tie into Sigbovik 2019.

Can't believe I hadn't heard of SIGBOVIK before. Thanks for the share!

I'm pretty sure that's not what a portmanteu is.

"A portmanteau ... [is] parts of multiple words ... combined into a new word as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog or motel, from motor and hotel"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau

In particular a portmanteau need not contain the original words as substrings.

Yeah, it's certainly a fun exercise, but it's not exactly what a portmanteau is. There's probably a better word for this, and if not, this creator is certainly entitled to invent a new one.

I find “portemantout” doesn't roll off the tongue. Instead, something like “portemantotal” would sound better.

Also, the defining characteristic of the problem that the words overlap is just not used for portemanteaux. For example: « porte » and « manteau » don't overlap in « portemanteau ». It's still a very nice problem!

> I find “portemantout” doesn't roll off the tongue. Instead, something like “portemantotal” would sound better.

But 'porte' and 'manteau' are French, so it makes sense to try to work in 'tout' rather than 'total'.

Also, 'portmantout' (not, I think, 'portemantout', since the original is 'portmanteau') involves only one change in vowel sound, right, not any major shift in pronunciation?

> Also, 'portmantout' (not, I think, 'portemantout', since the original is 'portmanteau') involves only one change in vowel sound, right, not any major shift in pronunciation?

Right on both counts. "Porte" means "door", "port" means "to carry/wear". The latter is the word used in "portmanteau". I also agree "portmantout" sounds nice, and very similar to "portmanteau".

> "Porte" means "door", "port" means "to carry/wear".

Thanks for the polite correction. (I said 'porte' when dissecting the word in my original post, even though I did get the word 'portmanteau' as a whole correct.)

Porte means wear/carry as a verb in the imperative form or singular indicative forms; it can also mean a door, probably for weird etymological reasons. In the case of porte-manteau it absolutely means carry. I don't know if this common kind of construction in French is technically supposed to be built from the imperative or indicative, which would alternate the way of building a corresponding construct in English. If it's the imperative, such constructs (garde-manger, promène-couillon, tire-au-flanc, lèche-vitrine, mange-mort) would be written like carry-all (you'd have keep-food, lick-window, eat-dead). If it's the indicative, and in particular the 3rd person (he/she/one), as in « [l'objet qui] porte [des] manteaux », then a corresponding English construct would be carries-all, keeps-food, … which just sounds very weird in English. I don't know what the official underlying grammatical construct is, but just trying to kind of keep the French construct while changing it slightly seems completely out of place.

Furthermore, nowhere does the idea of porte-manteau carry any meaning as to the exercice of the original post which looks for partially-overlapping words.

Edit:

That last paragraph of mine is just wrong. I just read Wikipedia and indeed the English word actually contains the ideas of overlap/truncation. That comes from the redefining of portemanteau (as a coat hanger, or the original term of the person carrying a coat) into a suitcase that splits in two equal parts. I just always assumed it described the way porte and manteau were stuck together (in which there's no overlap/truncation), instead of the suitcase meaning.

* I still maintain there's just no reason for the English word to have been bastardized into portmanteau.

* Also the fact that portmanteau/portemanteau is used to describe words being combined in a different way to how porte and manteau are combined just seems needlessly confusing.

Port as in to carry/wear is the noun, whereas porte is the corresponding verb. Porte-manteau is the logical form for the combined noun/adjective (as in carry-all, see-all). In English the common form for combining meanings is e.g. goal-keeper which in French translates as gardien de but ; porte-manteau is one of the classic cases where it's shortened to verb-noun. (For gardien de but it would be garde-but, which is weird, I guess it sounds like garde-manger.) Port-manteau just wouldn't sound right.

The funniest thing is that Portmanteau is not a french word in the first place. it's a large travelling case wich open like a book (in old english).

Porte-Manteau used to be the guy carrying the coat of the King and is not a Portmanteau. We translate portmanteau as "Mot-Valise" in french which means "Case(as in luggage)-Word".

Total is absolutely French. The fuel company did not take an English name! The « to » in the French total is pronounced exactly like the « teau » in porte-manteau. (Unlike « tout », of course.)

You made me realize that the word porte-manteau was indeed butchered into portmanteau, which is supposed to sound French if you pronounce it in English. That's just another level of silliness to me…

> The « to » in the French total is pronounced exactly like the « teau » in porte-manteau. (Unlike « tout », of course.)

Yes, that is why I referred to one change in vowel sound:

> Also, 'portmantout' (not, I think, 'portemantout', since the original is 'portmanteau') involves only one change in vowel sound, right, not any major shift in pronunciation?

(In fact I think it is not a bad thing if different words, even with common derivations, sound different.)

> You made me realize that the word porte-manteau was indeed butchered into portmanteau, which is supposed to sound French if you pronounce it in English.

As Fishkins (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18589920) points out, it is 'portmanteau' ('port' + 'manteau'), not 'portemanteau' ('porte' + 'manteau'). The fact that English speakers sound the 't' in 'port' is not, I think, the fault of the word!

As I answered Fishkins, « porte » in this context does mean carry (even though it could mean door, but that doesn't make any sense with porte-manteau).

My argument that portemantout/portmantout sounds weird is partly an aesthetic one: technically the change of vowel sound is sufficient to hear the difference, but when I say the french word out loud, it just sounds weird.

I guess in English if you're saying portmanteau/portemanteau (sorry I'm gonna keep writing both, the official English one is too annoying!) you're already going out of common English pronounciation and the short “oo” at the end does kind of push the message across.

In French it's a very mundane word, and only changing the last vowel sounds either like a mistake or… like it's trying too hard to be cutesy. (I guess you kind of have to really exaggerate that very slight « ou », and… then it's merely subjective.)

On the other hand, I suggested the alternative « total » because instead of changing the vowel, it adds an extra syllable to clarify the juxtaposition, and it simply sounds better in French. Admittedly, it doesn't sound particularly good in English, and it's really not an important debate to begin with, so I'll leave it at that.

edit: corrected a justification based on the idea that portmantout is not a portmanteau/portemanteau, because it is. also I reduced the number of times I wrote “just” because it was getting out of hand. dang I feel like I'm writing a commit message…

"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, it's the most amazing word I've ever seen" -- Big Bird

Shouldn't we be able to find even shorter ones and do some interesting bounds calculation on it, given the recent progress on supercycles?

Wasn't that Finnegan's Wake? :)

Finnigans's Wake: Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfalltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled

Arbitrary line from this work: shvilleinagelessnessextilestrawierratasselingarretsinastylelessquadronedistensibilitiesprawlingubernativelyeah

I ... struggle to figure out which is more readable.

What does it say, that I managed to pick out the word cheese?

"pizza" here. We are probably just hungry :D

I built something similar to cheat / win at "hanging with friends".

To see how easy it is to work with words, check out https://words.gumyum.com/ (source code included)

I managed to find autotomy, not in the list! https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/autotomy

cryptozoology also.

Looks like those two are not on the wordlist used.

This is somewhat useful. As an example, if I ever open a business, it will probably be called "greenbackspaceshipsychophysicshop"

That was great. Wonder if he can shorten it slightly by combining the unextendable portmanteaus based on the shortest words needed to join them. And also avoid choosing 'q' to randomly start words and increase chances of 'y' when starting words.

Also TIL about http://sigbovik.org/.

Yes I was thinking it would be interesting compression problem.

what is the purpose of this? A portmanteau stuffs meanings into it creating a new meaning, to do this the meanings must have something that the brain can find complementary. I think a portmanteau of everything meaning is essentially meaningless. And as such, a worthless piece of baggage.

It's a self made problem that was solved in an interesting way. Of course noone is going to use a portmanteau of every word ever, but if everything was done out of pure utility everything would be a bit stale...no?

Yep it’s not without use: it’s potentially a good source of prog-ish album titles.

It’s art and there’s a lot that’s interesting in the technique.

As Oscar Wilde said, "All art is useless".

Happy to have found "antidisestablishmentarianism" in there!

> it's called a "portmantout", since "tout" means "all" in French.

Oh wow, that's so wrong. A portemanteau is a "coat hanger" in english. The word itself is a portemanteau but it's also an image for something that holds a bunch of stuff together. So a word that holds words together is a portemanteau.

Edit: Oh, I read it incorrectly. The author is aware of the correct word and "portmantout" is another word he came up with.

Mark my words, someone is going to memorize the entire thing and use it as a party trick.

What is the wordlist source?

a link is given on the page

I couldnt find pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

Every other '-o-' in there is a conjunction like variants of 'of', so calling that monstrocity a word calls for a stretch of the imagination. That'd be like, I don't know, calling composed emoji a character, or a programm a function because you call main.

At the very least I wonder why there's no space after "scopic".

That word is in the oxford dictionary

There are phrases and collocations in the OED.

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