[Lingtyp] R: coronavirus and Zipf

[Ernei Ribeiro]

Dear Natalia,

In Brazilian Portuguese, the humorous form *coronga vírus* (or sometimes
only *coronga*) is being used. Coronga is a species of fish, but I
think that the word is unrelated to this. This form is used just because it
sounds funny.

Best,
Ernei

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 8:27 PM Paolo Ramat <paoram at unipv.it> wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> the short form for *coronavirus* is Covid-19. As in Russian, Ital. *corona
> *means* ‘*crown’; therefore it is not used as clipping for the virus
> name;  and there have been jokes like the Russian on Prince Charles.
>
>
>
> Best wishes and take care, without Clorox injections as it has been
> suggested…
>
>
>
> P.Rt.
>
>
>
> *Da:* Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] *Per
> conto di *Natalia Levshina
> *Inviato:* sabato 2 maggio 2020 12:47
> *A:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> *Oggetto:* [Lingtyp] coronavirus and Zipf
>
>
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
>
>
> I'm writing an informal blog post about the impact of the coronavirus
> pandemic on language, with a focus on Zipf's correlation between frequency
> and word/expression length. For example, the clipping *corona (*from*
> coronavirus) *is becoming increasingly popular in English:
> https://public.oed.com/blog/corpus-analysis-of-the-language-of-covid-19/
>
> I also have some data from Dutch, German, Russian and Polish. I'm
> wondering how other languages behave in that respect. In particular,
>
>
>
> 1) Is there a shorter form for coronavirus, like *corona*? Can it only
> refer to the virus, or also to the pandemic and the disease?
>
> 2) If there is such a form, is it used widely or occasionally (e.g.
> humorously/creatively/in quotes)? For example, in Russian *koronavirus* is
> the preferred form because *korona* means 'a crown'. There's an
> untranslatable Russian joke, *Prince Charles finally got a crown
> (korona), but it was the wrong one.*
>
> 3) Is there a popular everyday (i.e. non-astronomic) meaning of the word
> that corresponds to corona in that language (e.g. a crown, like in Russian)?
>
>
>
>
>
> 4) Also, are there any other abbreviations or substitutions (e.g. the use
> of a shorter formally unrelated word, like *car* instead of *automobile*)
> related to the pandemic you have observed?
>
>
>
> I promise to post a summary if I get enough interesting data.
>
>
>
> Many thanks and stay corona(virus)-free!
>
>
>
> Natalia Levshina
>
>
>
> --
>
> Natalia Levshina
>
> Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
>
> Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen
>
> The Netherlands
>
>
>
>
>
>
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