Adapting to the pandemic crisis through the lens of language: On the English semantic neologism lockdown and its adoption into Czech

Adapting to the pandemic crisis through the lens of language. On the English semantic neologism lockdown and its adoption into Czech Michal Škrabal (Charles University, Prague) ABSTRACT The influx of neologisms associated with the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates the natural need to expand the lexicon with new words when the language community is confronted with anew reality. Neological adoptions (the word lockdown in Czech) and semantic neologisms (the extension of the English word lockdown with anew meaning) thus directly reflect the adaptation to anew reality at the linguistic level. In my article relying primarily on empirical data from monitoring corpora of Czech and English, Ifocus mainly on the process of adapting the individual loanword into the Czech lexical system, successively on the conceptual, formal, morphological, word-forming, and syntactic level. The unproblematic integration of the word into the Czech environment, crowned by its inclusion in the emerging monolingual dictionary of Czech, may also testify to the state of the Czech language in today’s global world. KEYWORDS adaptation, COVID-19 pandemic, loanword, lockdown, monitoring corpora, neologism DOI https://doi.org/10.14712/18059635.2022.1.5 1 INTRODUCTION This article1 aims to describe the life path of one neologism in contemporary Czech. The word lockdown— unused in Czech until recently and only used rather rarely in English, and even then in aspecific context— has experienced asteep increase in frequency due to the health measures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. We are all well aware of this, having witnessed the unprecedented situation firsthand— and the empirical data (see especially section 2) do not contradict our intuition. It is clear that the pandemic has become afixed part of our present reality, as have some of the expressions associated with it (cf. Table 1 in Škrabal and Kavka 2021: 293). 1 This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (reg. no.: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). I also thank both anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their insightful comments and suggestions. Special thanks to my colleagues Václav Cvrček and Jan Kocek for their help with data processing and visualisation. OPEN ACCESS 86 LINGUISTICA PRAGENSIA 1/2022 The flood of neologisms associated with the coronavirus contagion and everything related to it2 points to the natural need to expand the vocabulary with new expressions when the language community is confronted with anew reality. Neological adoptions, or semantic neologisms, are thus adirect reflection of adaptation at the linguistic level— or, to put it more generally: neology is an example of linguistic adaptation to anew reality par excellence. However, it may not be entirely obvious, especially from alay perspective, that this is acomplex process, touching on different levels and aspects. For example, the psychological element plays an important role (the need to get used to the new reality, to cope with it mentally, including the prevention of pathological consequences), along with the socio-economic (the social and economic consequences of agiven novelty), political (the attitude of the political leaders and the media to the new reality, the frequency of neologisms in their statements and news coverage), and cultural aspects (the expansion of new concepts, creativity in dealing with neologisms), etc.; cf. also Dubey, Biswas, Ghosh et al. 2020. In this paper, Ilimit myself to the linguistic aspect, which is complex and multilayered enough in itself. The index of possible procedures for enriching the lexicon with new lexical units is very diverse (not only) in Czech: derivatives, compounds and blends, clippings and abbreviations, multi-word units, figurative uses, or loanwords (all of which are abundantly documented in this paper by the COVID-related neologisms— see section 3). Although loanwords— the case of the neologism lockdown— seem to be the most straightforward way, this does not mean that such an adaptation process is not fraught with remarkable phenomena on the formal, morphosyntactic, and conceptual levels of the new expression. In this paper, all these aspects will be described, along with the process that the neologism candidate3 goes through. 2 There is ahuge amount of literature on this topic, which has logically attracted the attention of linguists from all over the world. Neology and neography is currently in great demand— see, e.g., the series of GLOBALEX workshops on lexicography and neology, the special issue of the International Journal of Lexicography (2021/3), the numerous neographic repositories recording hundreds of pandemic-related words (www.neologismy.cz or www.cestina20.cz; cf. non-Czech ones such as Pojmovnik koronavirusa: https://jezik.hr/ koronavirus/?slovo=l or Neuer Wortschatz rund um die Coronapandemie: https://www.owid. de/docs/neo/listen/corona.jsp#), etc. The Czech situation is reflected in Škrabal and Kavka 2021, Lišková 2021, Hampl 2021, or Entlová 2022. 3 It is of course appropriate to ask whether it is really aneologism, or how to define such aneologism, and whether the term lockdown fulfils the concept of aneologism. In my other research (Škrabal, in prep.), Ihave defined atotal of seven criteria for determining neologisms: diachronic (the lexeme appeared only recently but did not appear in the previous period’s lexicon), denotative (it names anew phenomenon or concept, or aconcept (either new or old) is named through anew form), stratificational (it extends its original limited communication spread and impact), psychological (aspeaker perceives it as new), lexicographical (it is not included in dictionaries), degree of stability (it shows signs of formal (morphological, graphic, phonetic) or semantic instability), adaptability (it is capable of lexicalization and spread in usage and is acceptable by most speakers). The loanword lockdown meets most, if not all, of these criteria. OPEN ACCESS MICHAL ŠKRABAL 87 Next, Iintroduce my sources and methodology. In section 4, Idemonstrate the different aspects of language adaptation, supported by the empirical findings of section3. The final section summarizes the whole process of adaptation of the loanword under investigation into Czech. Although the process has probably not been completed yet, some partial conclusions can already be drawn. 2 SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY The sources of empirical data in this study are mainly the recent monitoring corpora of English (The Coronavirus Corpus4— hereafter CC) and Czech (Online— hereafterO). These should be taken into account despite their imbalance and unrepresentativeness, since especially in Czech the word lockdown is only sporadically documented before the pandemic, i.e., in older corpora. Monitoring corpora have been available to linguists for arelatively short time, yet they are an ideal research source for scrutinizing such atopical phenomenon. Regularly updated, ideally on adaily basis, they can reveal better than ever before the first occurrence of aword, its coinage and gradual spread among speakers. There is, however, aprice to pay, be it agenre bias, inferior metadata, flood of identical (unduplicated) texts, or ahigher level of unwanted content (boilerplate etc.). However, Ihave also used older sources, which served as reference material: the enTenTen2020 corpus5 (hereafter enTT) and Corpus of Contemporary American English6 (hereafter COCA) cover the initial part of the pandemic period. No suitable reference corpus is available for Czech, as we examine aphenomenon too recent to be captured in older corpora.7 CC is asubcorpus of the NOW (News on the Web) monitor corpus. It focuses on the COVID-19 discourse found on news websites in 20 English-speaking countries. First released in May 2020, it currently contains more than 1.2 billion running words, growing by 3–4 million words each day. And in turn, Isearched for Czech data in O, which in addition to online journalism also covers discussion forums and social networks, from 2017 to the end of March 2021.8 It is divided into two disjunctive sub-corpora: 4 https://www.english-corpora.org/corona/ 5 https://www.sketchengine.eu/ 6 https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/ 7 In the forthcoming SYN2025 corpus, we can already expect sufficient reflection of COVIDrelated words in written language, especially in journalistic texts. It is also hard to imagine the absence of these words in the forthcoming spoken corpora, given that the pandemic has become acommon topic of everyday conversation. 8 It would be ideal to have newer data but, unfortunately, due to along-lasting problem with data acquisition, Ois not regularly updated at the moment. In spite of this outage, it covers the key periods of the first three pandemic waves in the Czech Republic and the lockdowns that followed. Abrief summary of the pandemic period in the Czech Republic can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Czech_Republic. OPEN ACCESS 88 LINGUISTICA PRAGENSIA 1/2022 — Online_archive (hereafter OA, Cvrček and Procházka 2020a) covers the period from January 1 2017 to July 31 2020 (i.e., among others, the beginning of the pandemic through the first wave and lockdown to the release of restrictive measures in summer 2020) and contains almost 6.3 billion tokens. — Online_now (hereafter ON, Cvrček and Procházka 2020b) covers the period from September 1 2020 to March 31 2021 (i.e., the second wave of the pandemic, the second lockdown, the third wave and the beginning of the third lockdown) and contains almost one billion tokens. Based on this sample, Itry to find out in which discourses and contexts the word lockdown appears, and how these contexts and discourses change with time. In addition, Ialso look into various monolingual and English-Czech translation dictionaries (see section 4), but also platforms that record neologisms, regardless of their real frequency (see section 4.6). In this study, Icombine aquantitative and qualitative approach (discourse analysis of specific articles, but also discussion forums or memes, etc.). In addition to corpus data, petrified and available even after alapse of time, Ialso use aprivate archive of various materials— not only textual but also visual ones (screenshots)— which Iwas building up during the pandemic, some of which are now hard to find, if at all. 3 FROM QUALITATIVE BASIS TO QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS The article “What is alockdown, and could it occur due to coronavirus in the Czech Republic?”, published on 9October 2020 on the Seznam Zprávy server,9 is agood example of how the Czech media reported on this new phenomenon at that time. It is ashort informative article of 464 words, which aims to answer the reader’s anticipated questions. The text is divided into four parts, each prefaced by aquestion, followed by abrief (one or two paragraphs) answer. The two-sentence lead paragraph is highly meta-linguistic (skloňuje se ‘literally: is declined, i.e., is discussed thoroughly’; tak zvaný ‘so-called’; Co to ale znamená ‘but what does it mean?’). The question Co lockdown znamená ‘What does lockdown mean?’ is also the title of the first subhead, followed by abrief explanation, combining the translation equivalent (Doslovný překlad slova lockdown je „uzamčení“ ‘The literal translation of the word lockdown is “uzamčení”’) and amonolingual dictionary definition (… aznamená celostátní karanténu včetně zákazu volného pohybu osob mimo jejich bydliště… ‘and means astatewide quarantine, including aban on the free movement of people outside their homes’). Additional information on the conditions under which such asituation may occur follows: Rozsah lockdownu stanovuje vláda, záleží vždy na aktuální situaci, ve které se stát nachází, azté vychází přísnost daných opatření. ‘The extent of the lockdown is determined by the government, it always depends on the actual situation that the country is in, the severity of the measures being based on that.’ This metalinguistic complexity is agood indication of the novelty of both the lockdown phenomenon in the Czech environment and the 9 https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/lockdown-co-znamena-123579 OPEN ACCESS MICHAL ŠKRABAL 89 loanword in Czech. The rest of the article is no longer meta-linguistic, describing retrospectively the situation of the first wave of the pandemic in the spring that year, reporting on what the lockdown looks like in Israel, and finally, the author considers whether alockdown could be declared again in the Czech Republic. Subjecting the text to quantitative analysis,10 lockdown is understandably the most frequent content word (15 hits), while also carrying thematic concentration11 with another word: opatření ‘measures’ (7 hits). Other autosemantic keyword forms are: nadále ‘continually’ (4), Česku ‘Czechia’ (4), lidé ‘people’ (4), koronaviru ‘coronavirus’ (3), celostátní ‘statewide’ (3), nastat ‘arise/occur’ (3), bydliště ‘residence’ (3), jaře ‘springtime’ (3), řadu ‘set (N)’ (3), znamená ‘means (V)’ (3), and české ‘Czech (ADJ)’ (3). They correspond appropriately with the content of the article: lockdown is presented here as astatewide (celostátní) measure (opatření) affecting the lives of all people (lidé) in Czechia (Česku, české), who should preferably stay in their residences (bydliště) and not go out. The increased degree of the conditional mood (by 9, moci 5) reflects asituation where no one knew what would follow in the next days or weeks (the idiom přijít na řadu ‘get one’s turn’ 3), but there were fears that the crisis would not subside soon (nadále 4) (cf. asimilar interpretation of the collocational profile of COVID-related words at the end of this section, footnote 19). Less than two weeks later, on October 22, the lockdown was indeed announced by the Czech government. This is reflected in the rapid increase in the frequency of the term in O. The word lockdown started to appear sporadically much earlier (the first document related to the pandemic dates back to January 24 202012), but the beginning of mass use is linked to the second decade of November 2020, when the Czech Republic was one of the worst affected countries in the world in terms of COVID-related deaths per capita (see Fig. 1 below). Similarly, there is anoticeable difference between the frequency of lockdown in COCA (1990–2019, i.e., including the start of the pandemic; 1G words) and CC (January 2020— up to date, i.e., September 30 2021; 13.6G words). In genre-diverse (and balanced) COCA, the word is most prominent in TV/movies, spoken formats, and news, while CC is agenre monolith made up only of news websites. 10 For this purpose, Iuse tools Kwords (Cvrček and Vondřička 2013) and QuitaUp (Cvrček, Čech and Kubát 2020). 11 Acontent word whose absolute frequency is higher than its order in the rank frequency distribution of agiven text (cf. Popescu and Altmann 2011 or Čech 2016 specifically for Czech). 12 Two Twitter posts: 1.Čína vydala zákaz prodeje jakýchkoliv domácích nebo zahraničních zájezdů. Podřídit se musí všechny cestovní kanceláře vČíně. Následovat může snad už jen lockdown celé Číny. Chovají se, jako by to bylo horší než chřipka… 2.Přemýšlel jsem, jestli to může být být takovej katalyzátor jako Černobyl vSSSR. Ani ne tak virus sám jako lockdown 21 milionů lidí akdo ví kolik ještě přibude… Ale co to je ve víc jak miliardě neinformovaných… (‘1. China has issued aban on the sale of any domestic or foreign tours. All travel agencies in China must comply. The only thing that can follow is alockdown of the whole of China. They’re acting like it’s worse than the flu… 2.Iwonder if this could be acatalyst like Chernobyl in the USSR. Not so much the virus itself as the lockdown of 21 million people and who knows how many more to come… But what is more than abillion uninformed ones…’) OPEN ACCESS 90 LINGUISTICA PRAGENSIA 1/2022 COCA CC lockdown 1,424 hits • ipm 1.42 552,871 hits • ipm 40.7 lockdowns 63 • 0.06 78,601 • 5.79 lock-down 51 • 0.05 2,809 • 0.21 Table 1.Frequency of lockdown in COCA and CC Figure 1.Evolution of the frequency of lockdown in various online media types of Czech13 As areference corpus one can also use, e.g., the 100 million British National Corpus (BNC), published in 1993. Here lockdown appears only 4 times (ipm 0.04), twice hyphenated— which clearly indicates the peripherality of the word in the lexicon. Figure 2.Usage of lockdown in BNC 13 https://jupyter.korpus.cz/shiny/cvrcek/timeline/ OPEN ACCESS MICHAL ŠKRABAL 91 The following table shows the recent evolution of the usage frequency in CC: Figure 3.Evolution of the frequency of lockdown in CC In terms of frequency by country, South Africa (ipm 1,610), India (1,184), Pakistan (1,045), the UK (1,023) and New Zealand (968) top the list, while Canada (211) and, somewhat surprisingly, USA (202) and Jamaica (192) are at the bottom. Unfortunately, enTT does not provide reliable data for frequency evolution as its content was automatically crawled from English-language servers, but the individual documents do not contain the necessary metadata. Only the date of the download is given, which is not the same as the date of creation. It is therefore not possible to create two subcorpora— a“pre-pandemic” and “pandemic” ones— and compare relative frequencies. Thus, we only find the total frequency of the lockdown lemma: 256,875 hits; ipm 5.71. Yet, where this corpus, or rather the SketchEngine interface, serves us well are the word sketches, which summarize the grammatical and collocational behavior of the selected word in aclear and user-friendly way.14 Here we see the most prominent modifiers of lockdown (coronavirus, Covid-19/COVID-19, pandemic, nationwide/ nation-wide, countrywide, 21-day, four-week) or, conversely, nouns modified by lockdown (restrictions, measures, drills, easing, cornerback, curbs), verbs with lockdown as an object (reimpose, ease, impose, localise, lift, enforce) or subject (ease, exacerbate, impact, disrupt, lift, impose), adjectival predicates of lockdown (bearable, strict, restrictive, imminent, unnecessary), possessors of lockdown (Wuhan’s, Spring’s, Melbourne’s, Pandemic’s, March’s, Newsom’s, England’s) or the opposite of lockdown as the possessor (the lockdown’s impact on, the lockdown’s effect) and other combinations. In addition, the following data visualization is also available ( see Fig. 4 below ). 3.1 THE WORD LOCKDOWN IN THE ONLINE CORPUS The KonText interface (Machálek 2014), in which Iprocess the Czech data, does not offer similar word profiles, so Iwill limit myself to searching: (a) individual case forms Initial hypothesis: lockdown, as acountable noun, should be represented in its declension paradigm by all case forms (except the vocative) in both numbers (cf.Kováříková 2021). 14 Basically, it is anecessity; if we consider the resulting number of occurrences of agiven lemma (over aquarter of amillion), or the size of the whole corpus (over 38 billion words, or almost 45 billion tokens), even this quarter of amillion is only 0.0005712% (sic). OPEN ACCESS 92 LINGUISTICA PRAGENSIA 1/2022 (b) derivatives and compounds Initial hypothesis: if the number of derived lexemes and compounds increases (both in types and tokens), this indicates agradual entrenchment of the loanword in the Czech lexical system. (c) the most common collocations Initial hypothesis: as the collocational potential of aloanword increases, so does the degree of its adaptation in the target language. Moreover, specifically lockdown as aword connoting almost exclusively negative phenomena will show arather negative semantic preference. Iwill conduct these three searches in both OA and ON; the inter-comparison of the results then represents the diachronic element of the analysis— or the dynamic evolution of how lockdown behaves during the pandemic discourse. Figure 4.Visualization of the most common collocates of lockdown in the SketchEngine interface OPEN ACCESS MICHAL ŠKRABAL 93 a) singular plural OA ON OA ON lockdown (N/Asg)15 0.49 52.45 lockdowny (N/A/I/Vpl) 0.03 4.19 lockdownu (G/D/Lsg) 0.25 25.97 lockdownů (Gpl) 0.01 2.18 lockdownem (Isg) 0.05 3.42 lockdownům (Dpl) 0.0 0.55 lockdowne (Vsg) 0.0 0.05 lockdownech (Lpl) 0.0 0.44 singular forms 0.79 81.88 plural forms 0.04 7.37 TOTAL (lemma lockdown)OA: 0.83 • ON: 89.25 Table 2.Frequency distribution of the case forms of the lemma lockdown in O(in i.p.m.) Singular forms predominate over plural forms, especially at the beginning of the pandemic (ratio in OA about 22:116); later, after the lockdown is declared again (besides, there is talk of lockdowns in different countries), the use of plural forms increases and the ratio in ON decreases to about 11:1. b) OA ON tokens types tokens types17 prefixation and composition 21 hits • ipm 0.0 16 1,119 • 1.16 (284) suffixation 28 • 0.0 21 1,258 • 1.31 (321) gradual/combined formation 7 • 0.0 5118 • 0.12 (83) Table 3.Derivatives and compounds of lockdown in O The most common derivatives include the following (only from ON; in OA hapax legomena predominate): — prefixation and composition: nelockdown, pololockdown, minilockdown, antilockdown, pseudolockdown; these words also occur with ahyphen or as two separate forms (polo-lockdown/polo lockdown, pseudo-lockdown/pseudo lockdown), which testifies to their unstableness 15 Relatively frequent homonymy reduces the number of potential forms (up to 14) in this example to 8 (in other words: the lockdown lemma can be realized in Czech by eight different case forms). In this study, however, Irefrain from manually reviewing the results (occurrences of foreign language texts in the corpus, e.g., English or Slovak) and assigning homonymic forms to individual cases. (N=nominative, G=genitive, D=dative, A=accusative, V=vocative, L=locative, I=instrumental; sg=singular, pl=plural) 16 Cf. the above-mentioned article from the Seznam Zprávy server, where Nsg appears 12 times, Gsg twice, Asg and Isg once, while plural forms are absent. 17 Results have not been controlled manually. OPEN ACCESS 100 LINGUISTICA PRAGENSIA 1/2022 voiced /g/ as aresult of regressive assimilation). In this respect, the Czech pronunciation [logdaun], also reported in the emerging monolingual dictionary of Czech (see section 4.6 below), is unproblematic, but unfortunately, it cannot be verified with data.30 However, Ihave not observed any alternative pronunciation in the media, except perhaps for the voiceless variant [lokdaun], which requires some articulatory effort. On the graphic level, the situation is more varied. In English sources, there is ahyphenated variant lock-down, albeit minor (in the ratio of approximately 1:225 in CC, 1:37 in enTT). The majority variant, i.e. without ahyphen, has been adopted into Czech; the hyphenated variant appears sporadically. In addition, some speakers choose aphonetic transcription of the loanword, but the difference from the written form is so striking that this variant also appears minimally. OA ON lockdown.* 0.84 90.93 lock-down.* 0.02 0.85 lokdaun.* 0.0 0.72 Table 4.Occurrence of graphical variants of lockdown in O(in i.p.m.) Formal proximity to words of domestic origin inspires users to engage in deliberate language play (see 4.5 below). 4.3 THE MORPHOLOGICAL LEVEL OF ALOANWORD The morphological level of aloanword concerns mainly nouns that adopt the grammatical gender according to the natural gender (in the case of lockdown, the inanimate masculine31) and the formal ending (the hard consonant suggests inflection according to the pattern hrad ‘castle’). It is thus fully integrated into the Czech declension system, as evidenced by the representation of all the case forms (see 3.1a above). Where the adaptive potential of the Czech language is equally evident is in word formation. Lockdown serves as astarting point for the derivation of numerous new words: adjectives, verbs and other nouns, compounds, diminutives, or complex forms combining multiple principles (see 3.1b above for examples). 30 The specialized Czech database from 2014, containing transcribed pronunciation variants obtained from abalanced sample of 300 speakers for 300 foreign words (https://dvucs. ff.cuni.cz/), does not contain COVID vocabulary. Similarly, the multilingual pronunciation dictionary on the Forvo.com portal (Škrabal and Machač 2021, Machač and Škrabal 2021) does not contain any recordings of lockdown from Czech speakers; as of September 30 2021, it contained recordings only in German, English, Italian and Luxembourgish (https://forvo.com/search/lockdown/). Perhaps the perception of the foreignness of the word by non-English speakers plays arole here. 31 However, cf. the masculine form le covid in continental French (under the influence of le coronavirus) versus the more common, especially Quebec variant la covid (after the pattern la maladie ‘disease’) (Koláříková 2021: 35, Kadlec 2021: 112). OPEN ACCESS MICHAL ŠKRABAL 101 4.4 THE SYNTACTIC LEVEL OF ALOANWORD The syntactic level of aloanword follows the morphological level. By assigning anoun to adeclension paradigm, it is possible to inflect it and thus integrate it into the syntax of the target language. In this respect, there are no obstacles either: the original loanword has syntactic functions typical of Czech nouns, forming the lexical basis of the nominal phrase. As such, it can function as asubject (Do pár dnů bude lockdown ‘In afew days there will be alockdown’) or an oblique object (Dalo se na lockdown nějak připravit? ‘Was there any way to prepare for the lockdown?’), as various other types of complements (To by vtomhle případě ten dynamit musel být míněn jako LOCKDOWN ‘In this case, the dynamite would have to be meant as LOCKDOWN’; Aby to nebyl lockdown forever ‘It better not be alockdown forever’), or as an argument of deverbal nouns (důsledky lockdownu ‘the consequences of the lockdown’; strašení lockdownem ‘scaring [people] with alockdown’). Lockdown also functions as anoun modifier in binomial structures, following the English conversion model (alockdown > lockdown restrictions / easing / violators, we find the Czech lockdown menu ‘menu’ / opatření ‘measure(s)’/ režim ‘mode’), yet these cases are isolated and modify only alimited number of nouns (Zároveň ostatní ekonomiky vrámci různých lockdown opatření snížily nebo zastavily výrobu ‘At the same time, other economies have reduced or stopped production under various lockdown measures’). As the derivational and compound-forming potential is being fulfilled (see 3.1b above), other syntactic roles are realized too: adjectival forms function primarily as modifiers (lockdownové procházky Prahou ‘lockdown walks through Prague’; možná poslední předlockdownová ochutnávka ‘perhaps the last pre-lockdown tasting’), derived verbs as predicates (Sjeho návody bychom se brzy prolockdownovali do doby kamenné ‘With his instructions, we would soon lockdown ourselves into the Stone Age’). 4.5 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF ADAPTATION The psychological aspects of adaptation affect the way alanguage community mentally copes with anew reality. Specialist terms, previously used in narrow expert discourse, have entered the everyday media space and the speech of lay people, and have also given rise to avast number of colloquial forms. Concepts that are alien, unknown, and anxiety-inducing for the lay public are “humanized” by speakers, converted into something familiar, safe, and as though not to be feared: e.g., koroňák/ koronáč (augmentative expressions replacing the official term coronavirus); covídek/ koronáček (diminutive suffixes “neutralizing” adangerous disease); both suffixes— although semantically they are opposites— function here as adomesticating feature (cf. Będkowska-Kopczyk and Łaziński (2020) who speak of the Russian neologism kovidlo as ameans of “taming COVID-19”, by imitating other words (strašidlo ‘bogeyman’, povidlo ‘plum jam’)). Such casual denominations, using often unproductive and marginal means, are an example of the so-called parasystematic formation, which is based on anomaly, “on looser rules of derivation and composition and possesses distinctive formants and word-formation types” (Pleskalová 2000: 42, cf. Ziková 2001). Language play and humor, not by any means limited to the domain of literature (Carter 2004, cf. Moon 2009), is concomitant of this strategy, bringing relief in stressful situations associated with pandemics and related constraints. Formal proximity with familiar words motivates speakers toward linguistic creativity, which flourishes OPEN ACCESS 102 LINGUISTICA PRAGENSIA 1/2022 especially on social networks, blogs, and discussion forums.32 Here, the pandemic discourse is often carried in atense atmosphere, with emotions and political incorrectness omnipresent. Needless to say, this is not an idiosyncratic feature of the Czech language at all. Similarly, English also has been enriched with alarge number of neologisms and occasional words, the primary motivation of which is not only to name the new reality, but also to relieve stress and tension (covidiot, moronavirus, pandumbic, covexit, Rona to name just afew). As for lockdown, the homonymic pronunciation of the first component with the Czech word lok ‘gulp, swig’ prompted an unknown meme maker, who ironically refers to the Czech President Zeman’s fondness for alcohol (there are two photographs on the meme: Zeman is drinking liquor in the first one, and then collapsing), but also to the brewer of the Beznoska microbrewery, who named his new 15 India pale lager Lokdown.33 The replacement of the initial lby rgave rise to the occasionalism rokdown, as in 1 rokdown za námi ‘1 year-down behind us’ (headline of Deník N, 16 March 2021; cf. the definition from the dictionary Čeština 2.0 ‘ayear spent by restricting ordinary life’), and similarly in English the ad hoc created shockdown appeared (‘Shockdown’: what the Sunday papers say about England’s new Covid-19 lockdown34). Aphoto-report of limited pub-crawling in locked-up Prague inspired the author to the headline Tour de beer vLocktownu ‘Tour de beer in Locktown’.35 However, these modifications do not remain only on the level of individual graphemes or phonemes, even old idioms and proverbs are updated: e.g., březen— do lockdownu vlezem, duben— ještě tam budem, literally ‘March— we will enter the lockdown, April— we will still be there’ (newsletter of Seznam.cz, 5March 2021). On another meme, awoman is greeting aman with the words: Veselé izolace ašťastný nový lock ‘Merry Quarant-mas and a Happy New Lock’. 32 E.g., atwitter forum where people came up with ideas for the Czech equivalent of lockdown. There are dozens of suggestions registered here, mostly nonce words. See https://twitter.com/hosekj/status/1314961152535859200. Another example from Twitter (@lingvojazyce, 10 October 2020) illustrates the meta-linguistic reflection on the word: LOCKDOWN do češtiny pronikl snáz než do našeho fungování. Bez lockdownu, slockdownem, tydlencty lockdowny… Krásně od něj vytvoříme sloveso LOCKDOWNOVAT, má vazbu se 4.p.: lockdownovat někoho. Teď čekám, jestli se ujme LOCKDOWN(N)OUT. Kdy nás asi Prymula lockdowne? (‘LOCKDOWN has penetrated the Czech language more easily than our functioning. Without lockdown, with lockdown, them lockdowns… It is easy-peasy to form the [imperfective] verb LOCKDOWNOVAT, it takes the accusative: to lockdown someone. Now I’m waiting to see if [perfective] LOCKDOWN(N)OUT takes as well. Iwonder when Prymula [ex-health minister] will lockdown us?’) 33 The Beznoska brewery was often inspired by the current epidemiological situation when naming its beers, e.g., Nouzový zelenáč ‘Emergency greenhorn’, Respivátor < respirátor ‘respirator’ + pivo ‘beer’, Záchranář ‘Rescuer’, Druhá/Třetí/Čtvrtá vlna ‘First/Second/Third Wave’, Domácí pohoda ‘Home well-being’, Rozvolňovač ‘Relief-bearer’. 34 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/01/shockdown-what-the-sunday-papers-say-about-englands-new-covid-lockdown 35 https://www.metro.cz/fotoreportaz-tour-de-beer-v-locktownu-dhg-/praha. aspx?c=A210310_190830_metro-praha_hyr OPEN ACCESS MICHAL ŠKRABAL 103 Moreover, words associated with COVID-19 are gaining notorious popularity. Lockdown itself was even named the Word of the Year 2020 by the editors of the Collins Dictionary.36 4.6 THE LEXICOGRAPHICAL PROCESSING OF LOANWORDS The lexicographical processing of loanwords together with their publication in aprestigious dictionary is akind of completion of the neologization process, confirming the “legitimacy” of aword and its entrenchment in the target language. This ‘dictionarization process’ (cf. Lauria 2011) may be aprocess of varying length, but the pandemic has managed to shorten it considerably: e.g., the word coronavirus was included in M-Wonly 34 days after its first appearance, which is the fastest ever in the history of this dictionary.37 The authors of the emerging Academic Dictionary of Contemporary Czech reacted similarly promptly, prioritizing pandemic-related entries (Lišková and Šemelík 2020), including lockdown, which is defined as ‘arestriction on the free movement of persons in an area to preserve the safety or health of the public’. Moreover, the explicit usage note is given that the word became more frequently used in Czech in 2020 in connection with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In addition to traditional dictionaries, there are also collaborative online dictionaries that often capture neologisms even better (Škrabal and Kavka 2021). For English, this is the Urban Dictionary (UD),38 which has 29 entries for lockdown itself and another 61 for its use in various phrases. Nonetheless, not all entries have been added recently, during the pandemic. In fact, only 41 entries are COVID-related. Four entries date back to 2003 and a2006 entry lockdown gives seven individual meanings. The Czech equivalent of UD is the dictionary portal Čeština 2.0, which, besides lockdown, has another eight entries for its expressive synonyms (koropakárna, domahnij, koronazávora, venikrok, babiškrť, zarach, zdravora, lokáč39). 5 SUMMARY The corona crisis has provided us with the unique chance to see the birth and establishment of new lexical units “live”, so to speak, just as we witnessed the outbreak and rapid 36 According to the Dictionary’s authors, the word lockdown reflects the shared experience of billions of people around the world, cf. OED’s winner: unprecedented (https://www.bbc. com/news/entertainment-arts-55016543), M-W’s: pandemic (https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-year/pandemic), and vaccine for 2021, while koronavirus won the Czech poll (https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/slovo-roku-neprekvapije-to-koronavirus-135335). 37 https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-year/coronavirus 38 https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lockdown 39 The last entry was added to the dictionary in December 2014 with the meaning ‘apothole in the road, covered with water, also alarge puddle in general’. Anew meaning, based on phonetic similarity with lockdown, has been added during the pandemic (https://cestina20.cz/slovnik/lokac/). OPEN ACCESS 104 LINGUISTICA PRAGENSIA 1/2022 combustion of lexical supernovas. The word lockdown is one of those that has been organically incorporated into the Czech language— the Czech-speaking community has adopted the term as its own, has become familiar with it (see especially 4.5 above), and has preferred it to its domestic equivalents. The reasons for this are simple: the pragmatic motives of the speakers prevail over any purist, protective attitudes; what matters is mainly the ability to immediately satisfy the need to name anew concept, while domestic equivalents can be cumbersome, unnatural, and impractical (limited ability to derive from multi-word units). The word has adapted easily and very quickly both to the Czech lexicon (4.1, 4.2) and grammatical system (4.3, 4.4), in terms of its content and form. Its novelty and unusualness is being erased day by day, as the high frequency of use contributes to its growing saliency. The immediate lexicographical treatment in the emerging monolingual dictionary of Czech (4.6) also contributes to its acceptability. Freed from the mostly negative connotations associated with this term, the neologism lockdown is an enrichment of the Czech lexicon. Such globally shared words (cf. T.Thorne’s 2020 “coronaspeak” or “covidictionary”; D.Crystal’s 2020 “covocabulary”) only underscore the fact that we are all inhabitants of one global village, and efforts to close our mother tongue against them so as not to ‘pollute’ or ‘corrupt’ it40 are foolish. To the contrary, the Czech language has absorbed this foreign word (along with many others) with ease, enriching them with typical Czech elements (prefixes/ suffixes, endings, alarge degree of inflection). Yet, it has not completely abandoned the domestic equivalents. This testifies to its vitality in the linguistic global village. REFERENCES 40 See, for example, some posts on social media: Je zcela nepřijatelné, aby se včeštině používaly slova jako lockdown či kurzarbeit.— Lidi čeština je tak krásný jazyk, musíte ho pořád prznit výrazy jako lockdown, sickday apod.— Proč se čeština przní barbarskou angličtinou! Třeba lockdown, tak za tento cizácký humus není včeštině náhrada? Jděte sprimitivní angličtinou už do hajzlu! (‘It is completely unacceptable to use words like lockdown or kurzarbeit in Czech.— Folks, Czech is such abeautiful language, do you have to keep defiling it with terms like lockdown, sickday etc.— Why is Czech being defaced with barbaric English! For example lockdown, is there no substitute for this foreign rubbish in Czech? Go to hell with primitive English!’) Będkowska-Kopczyk, A. and M.Łaziński (2020) COVID-19 Vocabulary in Slavic. In: Greenberg, M.L. et al. (eds) Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online. 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DICTIONARIES Akademický slovník spisovné češtiny— Available at https://www.slovnikcestiny.cz/. Čeština 2.0— Available at https://cestina20.cz. Lingea Lexicon (2002), ver. 4.0 [CD version]. Merriam-Webster Dictionary— Available at https://www.merriam-webster.com/. Online-Wortschatz-Informationssystem Deutsch— Available at https://www.owid.de/. Oxford English Dictionary— Available at https://www.oed.com/. Pojmovnik koronawirusa— Available at https:// jezik.hr/koronavirus/. Urban Dictionary— Available at https://www. urbandictionary.com/. Michal Škrabal Institute of the Czech National Corpus Faculty of Arts, Charles University nám. Jana Palacha 2, Praha 1, 110 00 0000-0001-9358-3361 [email protected] OPEN ACCESS