SOME LEXICAL ASPECTS OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN FRENCH AND ROMANIAN. LUDIC CREATION

Abstract The past century witnessed a dynamic process in the lexicon of languages, in terms of both borrowings and newly created words. Since the beginning of 2020, the phenomenon of the Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a significant increase in the number of words in all languages, thus bringing many changes on social and psychological levels, interfering both in the life of each citizen and in the daily vocabulary. In its first part, this paper intends to make a brief presentation of the French and Romanian dictionaries and minidictionaries in which the pandemic vocabulary plays an important role, including the most popular ones, such as Le Petit Robert and Le Petit Larousse illustré (2022), the new edition of DOOM – The Orthographic, Orthoepic and Morphology Dictionary of the Romanian Language, published by the end of 2021, but also online dictionaries such as Lexiques et vocabulaire published by the Canadian Government in April 2021, Mini-dicționar de pandemie COVID-19 – A Pandemic Minidictionary by Ghenadie Râbaciov, etc. The second part of the paper concentrates on some atypical dictionaries in order to underline their importance in a specific type of perception of the phenomenon called the Covid-19 pandemic. These dictionaries integrate the ludic creation of words, manifested in two different ways: one involving humour, the other simply playing with internalised definitions of certain words from the newly created vocabulary. The diversity of examples allows a reflection on word formation, with the conclusion that the most frequent processes are affixation, compounding, and the creation of portmanteau words. This last process is particularly well represented by Olivier Auroy’s Dicorona (2020), while with the Mic dicționar literar de pandemie – Small literary dictionary of the pandemic (2020) created by the Romanian journal Scena9, we have interesting definitions of words belonging to this newly created vocabulary. Keywords: Ludic creation; Lexicon; Vocabulary; The Covid-19 pandemic; Dictionary; Humour.