Croatian Blends in the 1980s (Feral’s First 10 Years)

The paper is a report on the yet unreaserched corpus of Croatian blends collected from the first ten yearly volumes of the satirical weekly Feral or Feral Tribune. Basic formal characteristics of the blends are further expounded. Three findings are brought forward. Firstly, blends were rare in Feral until 1989, when they became very frequent, and equal in form and content to blends in subsequent Feral Tribune. Secondly, in the 1980s there were more blends in the weekly Nedjeljna Dalmacija than in Feral, which was a supplement to Nedjeljna Dalmacija; this gives us a better idea of the general pulse of Croatian blending in the 1980s. Thirdly, comics author Ivica Bednjanec remains, as far as we know, the most prolific blend-maker of the decade. The following was established regarding semantic and formal characteristics of the blends in Feral. First, 80% of a total of 210 blends are nouns. Second, 46% of blends consist of a name as one of their components. In 61% of cases, the name is the first blend component. Third, a relatively large number of blends have the acronym (13%) as one of their components. In 69% of cases, the acronym is the first blend component. Fourth, the first blend component tends to be somewhat shorter in general. The ratio of the number of syllables in the analyzed corpus is 1.00 : 1.18. Fifth, there are extremely few blends with a simultaneous clipping of the ending of the first and the beginning of the second component. The blends of the analyzed corpus are based on the overlapping of the same phonetic material of the first and the second components.