Hapax Legomenon

A hapax legomenon is a word or phrase that occurs only once in a given corpus (usually an entire language, but sometimes in a particular text, or the work of a particular author). They are often found in dead languages, but my friend badger may have found one in Spanish: parracial

It apparently occurs in a poem by Pablo Neruda:

La parracial rosa devora
y sube a la cima del santo:
con espesas garras sujeta
el tiempo al fatigado ser:
hincha y sopla en las venas duras,
ata el cordel pulmonar, etonces
llargamente escucha y respira.

It doesn’t appear in any of the Spanish dictionaries that she consulted (or in any of the online ones that I looked at), and a Google search turns up 7 hits: 2 hits to her blog mentioning her search, 2 hits to another blog referring to her blog, 1 hit to the poem itself, and 2 to an essay about Neruda.

Comments are closed.

  • Some of my Books

  •  

    October 2004
    M T W T F S S
    « Aug   Nov »
     123
    45678910
    11121314151617
    18192021222324
    25262728293031
  • Categories

  • Recent Comments

  • Meta