Backronym Creation and Poetic Etymology (Introduction and Description of Two New Artistic Devices)

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 PhD student of Persian language and literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

2 Associate Professor of Persian Language and Literature, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran

Abstract

This article tries to describe two artistic devices which have not been paid attention yet. In the first device, i.e. backronym, the poet/ writer considers each phoneme/ grapheme of a simple word as an initial phoneme/ grapheme of another word, so that a simple word is considered as an acronym. This process adds some secondary meanings to the central meaning of the word which do not exist in its root and structure. In the second device, i.e. poetic etymology (or etymological deviation), the poet/ writer forges an etymology to impose one’s desired meaning to the word. In spite of folk etymology, etymological deviation is a conscious and artistic process. The data collection method of this article is library method and the authors' research method is descriptive and analytical. In this research, we deal with two main processes, i. e. backronym creation and poetic etymology, which are defined linguistically and compared to each other as well as being discussed and analyzed using various examples from different texts.

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