FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

βλαβοποιέω (blabopoieо̄) “to harm”, a post-classical, Egyptian Greek verbal lemma. This is a hapax legomenon in the papyri. The formation consists of the a-stem noun βλάβη (blabē) “harm” and the doing verb turned suffix (-οποιέω -opoieō) (if you want to find out how, see https://journal.fi/finjol/article/view/142559). The attestation comes from the second-century CE papyrus P. Gen. 2 107, l. 7 (see further https://papyri.info/current/11254#text). The papyrus is a petition to a higher-level official. The formations with this suffix (-οποιέω -opoieō) seem to have an affinity for technical registers from their earliest attestation onwards, such that this neologism is not surprising given the type of text it appears in, but attests to the continuing productivity of the word-formation pattern.

I am a historical linguist. My work focusses on language contact and multi-word expressions in papyrological, epigraphic, and literary corpora of (post-)classical Greek and Latin. Thus, new formations (whether we term them neologisms, neoterms, or creativity) appear in language-contact contexts frequently when the languages draw on converge intentionally or unintentionally. Multi-word expressions, and verbal multi-word expressions in particular due to their diachronic stability, are a locus of neologistic coinages in a range of contexts, e.g. administrative (in papyri), medical (in so-called literary texts), or funerary (in epigraphy). (Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6302-3726)