FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

An interesting neologism invented and coined in Bulgarian is the word ‘hipodile’. It is a blending of ‘hippopotamus’ and ‘crocodile’ and was initially the name of a Bulgarian rock band. Usually, the proper names do not have lexical meaning but that proper name refers to a nonexistent animal (possibly a monster) that combines the features of a hippopotamus and crocodile challenging in that way the imagination of language users. Also, it is interesting that neologism includes prefix of Latin and not Bulgarian origin and can be interpreted by non-Bulgarians as well. It still cannot be found in popular language corpora of other languages including among the Google search results.

Velislava Stoykova is a Doctor of Science at the Department of Terminology and Terminography of the Institute for the Bulgarian Language ”Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin”, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She graduated from the Sofia University ”St. Kliment Ohridsky”, Faculty of Slavic Philology as master’s in Bulgarian Language and Literature. Later, she received a PhD (2004) in General and Comparative Linguistics. In 2011, she started to work as an assistant professor at the Institute for the Bulgarian Language ”Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin”, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, applying her expertise in semantics, formal language models, lexicography, and terminology. She is the author of two monographs: „Computational Morphology of the Bulgarian Definite Article in DATR” (2012) and „Bulgarian Pronouns in Universal Networking Language” (2019) (both published by the ”St Kliment Ohridsky University Press” in Bulgarian) and is co-author of the multivolume academic „Dictionary of Bulgarian Language”, vol. 12 (2004), vol. 14 (2012), and vol. 15 (2015), „Dictionary of Bulgarian Synonyms with Antonyms” (2013), „Terminological Encyclopedic Dictionary of Arts” (to appear) as well as of more than 60 articles many of which published in leading scientific journals. She participated in fundamental science research, working on more than 25 research projects (both national and international), for some of which she was an initiator and leading researcher. She is a member of the Bulgarian Lexicograpic Society, Bulgarian Artificial Intelligence Association (BAIA), and the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).