Revisiting Neologisms in Harry Potter

広島文教大学紀要 54，2019 【原著】 Revisiting Neologisms in Harry Potter Cristina Tonog Malimban ハリーポッターにおける造語の再考クリスティーナマリンバン Introduction For the past decades, a vast amount of new words and expressions have been added to the English language. These are neologisms or newly coined words in technology, the internet, economics, entertainment and pop culture and others that have greatly contributed to the English corpus. Examples of those coinages are smartphone, texting, ecommerce, slumdog, burkini and octomom, to name a few. In Colin’s dictionary, neologism is defined as a new word or expression in a language, or a familiar word or expression that is now being used with a new meaning. Interestingly, there are about 14 new words being created a day, or one word every 98 minutes according to the Global Language Monitor in 2018. Literature also plays an important role in these word inventions as Shakespeare was known to have invented more than 1700 words in his literary works which helped shaped the English language that we know today (Shakespeare-online.com). Other notable authors such as Chaucer, Tolkien and Dahl had largely contributed to the English language corpus, and some of their contributions are discussed in the later sections. A contemporary writer and wordsmith, J. K. Rowling is also known to have created hundreds of neologisms in her seven-book series of Harry Potter. More than twenty years later after the first book of the series was published, the Harry Potter saga continues to inspire people and influence the English language with Potter-related words that keep on mushrooming. In 2017 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first book in the series, marked its 20th year. Coincidentally, the Harry Potter word ‘quidditch’ was added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). This is the second word from the series to be added into mainstream use; the first one being the term ‘muggle,’ which was earlier entered in the dictionary in 2003 (Wikipedia.org.) The OED entry ‘quidditch’ which means an imaginary game where players fly on broomsticks, is a popular sport in the Potter world, while ‘muggle’ in OED meaning a person who is not skilled in a particular activity, is a term for a non-magical human in the book series. Aside from these two OED additions, the author, J. K. Rowling created many more neologisms in the seven-book series that have already appeared in the Cambridge English Corpus and the Spoken British National Corpus due to their popularity (Norton, 2017). Also, there emerged many Harry Potter -related ─ 1 ─ words outside Harry Potter’s magical world or ‘Potterverse’ that have significantly changed the language dynamics of the English-speaking world. It is in this line that this paper’s aim is based, to examine Rowling’s collection of skillfully created words in the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, that has largely contributed to the books’ and the author’s phenomenal success, and how other Potteresque words have helped invigorate the English language. Background To help understand more of Rowling’s neologisms, it is a good starting point to look into the first book in the series, where all these Potter coinages began. The neologisms ‘quidditch’ and ‘muggle,’ together with numerous others, first appeared in book one, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The first of the seven-book saga, the Philosopher’s Stone, has literally taken the world by storm since its first publication in 1997. The book chronicles the young wizard Harry Potter growing up with muggle relatives who hate him, and his first year in Hogwarts, the magical school for witchcraft and wizardry. In this book, young and adult readers have been enchanted by Harry’s adventure as an orphan boy growing up to be a bright, brave wizard as he sets to defeat the Dark Lord Voldemort and avenge the death of his parents. As Harry Potter, together with his friends, discovers the magical rooms, passageways and moving staircases around the bewitched castle of Hogwarts, he learns his first magic spell; and the fans share this new-found adventure with him. As events unfold with Rowling’s clever use of invented words that make the characters and situations come to life, readers could not help but be magically drawn to it all. The fans positive reactions to the first book slowly became globally contagious, and the Philosopher’s Stone took off. With the publishing of the American version, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone a year after, the book soon became a worldwide phenomenon. As such, the Harry Potter saga is now hailed as the best-selling book series in history, having sold more than 500 million copies worldwide since the first book was published in 1997; which inarguably cemented J. K. Rowling’s place as the 9th best-selling fiction author of all time (Wikipedia.org.) Many critics attributed this success to the author’s effective mixture of the right literary formulas of magical fantasy, the beautiful dichotomy of good and evil, the author’s narrative technique and the creations of neologisms wittingly crafted by the genius author, J. K. Rowling (Gobel, 2002). In the Philosopher’s Stone, the author’s extraordinary use of language was reflected in the numerous invented names for places, things and characters such as Hogwarts, Dumbledore, Voldemort, Draco, mudblood, Quaffle, Golden Snitch, Remembrall, Diagon Alley, Put-outer; as well as some magic spells like Wingardium Leviosa, Pertificus Totalus, Alohomora and Locomotor Mortis. These neologisms will be the focus of this paper, as well as the word formation processes the author used in creating them. ─ 2 ─ Revisiting Neologisms in Harry Potter Neologisms in Literature Neologism or neology in itself was a made-up word in 1770s, which literally translates to ‘new word,’ taken from Greek words ‘neos’, meaning new, and ‘logos’, meaning word or utterance. In literature, neologism or word coining is not something new. In fact, to quote Shakespeare in his play Coriolanus in 1607, he wrote, “So shall my lungs coin words till their decay.” The English corpus we know today consists of countless literary inventions of great authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Tolkien, Lewis, and Dahl to name a few. According to Shakespeareonline. com, Shakespeare alone had contributed more than a thousand literary neologisms, and some are still in use today such as bump, luggage, obscene and swagger, which first appeared in Romeo and Juliet, King Henry IV, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, respectively. Additionally, other notable authors had their fair share of literary neologisms. For example, the first to use ‘twitter’, was Geoffrey Chaucer who introduced the word long before the age of internet and blogging; Jonathan Swift must have predicted the internet age when ‘yahoo’ first appeared in his Gulliver’s Travel; Lewis Caroll’s funny creation ‘chortle’ in his poem Jabberwocky, is a sound made by combining chuckle and snort by someone who probably sees a ‘butterfinger’, a word by Charles Dickens, meaning a clumsy person. We are also ‘bedazzled’, from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, by witty word inventions of Tolkien’s ‘hobbit’, which means a halfling or a little creature; and by Roald Dahl’s ‘gremlins’, the small creatures that caused mechanical problems in aircraft; or by ‘nerd’ coined by Dr. Seuss in his book If I Ran the Zoo, meaning a boring person; and lastly, by Tolkien’s famous synonymous word for hope, ‘eucatastrophe’, (opposite of catastrophe), to describe a sudden shift from a supposed sad ending of a story to a happy one. Some of these neologisms that were coined 50 or 70 years ago, and lately became more popularly used, remind us that neologism has a powerful and important task to keep language constantly evolving, changing and adapting, and as such, literary authors are considered one of the greatest manipulators of language. Word Formation Processes in Neologisms Neologism, as a process of creating new word, covers a broader range of word-formation processes which are central to this study. Newly formed words may fall under any or a combination of these processes namely: coining, eponym, compounding, blending, clipping, backformation, conversion, acronym, and borrowing. Each will be discussed briefly with examples for each process. Coining or coinage happens when a totally new word is created or invented, especially for a concept or object that is previously nonexistent. A modern example of coinage is ‘google’, which originated from a misspelling of googol, which represents the number 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Other examples are ebay, xerox, Klennex, teflon, zipper, and vaseline, which started as brand names for commercial products and later became general terms (Fromkin et al. 2011). Eponyms are words from proper names, derived from the person who first created the object or did the ─ 3 ─ activity. The more recent example is ‘paparazzi’, which was derived from Signor Paparazzo in the movie La Doce Vita; and an older examples are ‘boycott’ from Charles Boycott, and ‘sandwich’ from the 18th century 4th Earl of Sandwich. Quidditch and muggle can be categorized as newly coined words from the Harry Potter series. Compounding is generally one of the most productive word formation processes in the English language according to Ljung (2003). In this process, two words or more are joined together to form a new word. Most English compounds are nouns such as the recent ones ‘Facebook’, ‘YouTube’ and ‘cyberspace’, but compound adjectives are also possible like bittersweet, hard-earned and over-ripe. In the third book, Harry Potter received a ‘Firebolt’, a superfast broomstick, as a present from his godfather Sirius Black. Blending or portmanteau occurs when two words or more are joined together whose meaning is often a combination of the original words, for examples ‘brunch’ (breakfast + lunch) and ‘smog’ (smoke + fog).

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