I am only a beginner with Esperanto, but I like to ask questions that come to mind sooner rather than later, so that I don't forget them. Here are two:

1) Is there a word for portmanteau in Esperanto (and what is it)?

2) Are there examples of portmanteau in Esperanto (and what are some)?

I did a preliminary search of the web and wasn't able to find much. If you find something please link it!

Clarification:
In my searches, especially relating to Esperanto, there seem to be a handful of people using the word portmanteau to (in my mind erroneously) denote the simple compounding of words. Obviously this is a built-in feature of Esperanto, and is extremely common in English as well. On the other hand, a portmanteau word is:

1.(linguistics) A word which combines the meaning of two words (or, rarely, more than two words), formed by combining the words, usually, but not always, by adjoining the first part of one word and the last part of the other, the adjoining parts often having a common vowel; for example, smog, formed from smoke and fog.
-Wiktionary

Note that "sm" and "og" don't have any particulate meaning on their own; this, I think, is what really defines the idea. I would like you to restrict your answers to this more narrow meaning (Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_portmanteaus; notice that some words are merely a (root) word combined with a quasi-suffix, e.g. "fandom", and these are obviously very common; rather, I want things like meld and tofurkey which are nonsensical without back-reference to the original words). With so many atomized agglutinative meanings in Esperanto, I would think it would be difficult to accomplish the same as easily as in English. Please prove me wrong!

Vikipedio has 'kofrovorto' (coffer-word). I have no idea how coffers have anything to do with portmanteaus though.

Edit: think I found the reason, apparently 'portmanteau' also means suitcase. Didn't know that!

The closest thing I can think of off the top of my head, to this sort of word, is a scene in "Pasporto al la Tuta Mondo", where one character says something like (and I can't guarantee that this is an exact quote), "Mi scias pri telefono, sed pri teleŝafo - mi neniam aŭdis!"

But perhaps this isn't what you are looking for, as although "telefono" is not "tele-fono", "tele-" has taken on a sort of pseudo-affix usage, and "ŝafo" is a word in its own right.

Christa627:The closest thing I can think of off the top of my head, to this sort of word, is a scene in "Pasporto al la Tuta Mondo", where one character says something like (and I can't guarantee that this is an exact quote), "Mi scias pri telefono, sed pri teleŝafo - mi neniam aŭdis!"

But perhaps this isn't what you are looking for, as although "telefono" is not "tele-fono", "tele-" has taken on a sort of pseudo-affix usage, and "ŝafo" is a word in its own right.

I don't get it (unless it means tele-sheep?). Can you explain it (like I said, I'm a beginner)?

seveer:

Christa627:The closest thing I can think of off the top of my head, to this sort of word, is a scene in "Pasporto al la Tuta Mondo", where one character says something like (and I can't guarantee that this is an exact quote), "Mi scias pri telefono, sed pri teleŝafo - mi neniam aŭdis!"

But perhaps this isn't what you are looking for, as although "telefono" is not "tele-fono", "tele-" has taken on a sort of pseudo-affix usage, and "ŝafo" is a word in its own right.

I don't get it (unless it means tele-sheep?). Can you explain it (like I said, I'm a beginner)?

Yeah, tele-sheep. I guess it doesn't make much sense out of context; in that episode, Ruselo was somehow getting information from his pet sheep, about a flock of sheep in danger, back in his own homeland. Which is rather odd, but that is a rather odd series.

In Esperanto there are two types of words - a limited set of words that can be used without a grammatical ending (eg la, pri, kiel, etc) and all the rest, which always have a grammatical ending. (exception in poetry and songs where a word may have its 'o' elided.)

So if one wanted to be pedantic one could say that 'homa', for example, consists of 'homo' truncated to 'hom' plus 'a' and neither of those elements can actually stand alone as words so it is a portmanteau word, like smog where sm and og are not words.

But, I can hear you saying, Seveer that this doesn't really answer your question.

In English there are words constructed with components of words that have a limited possibility of use in building other words. So 'fandom' is considered as falling into a special category but 'teacher' not so, since -dom can't be freely used in the language but -er can.

Esperanto has something parallel to this. Sometimes people refer to certain elements as pseudo-suffixes. They are not as freely usable as say -ul or -ej, but on the other hand they are not completely cut of from the possibility of generating other words.

These pseudo-suffixes (also prefixes) are often derived from international words. The process whereby they become active in word building is similar to that in English. They just get generalised as people find them useful. But they leave behind words in the language (the ones that gave birth to the affix) that remain considered as not constructed.

In English 'Watergate' is not a compound word like Pleb-gate or Iran-gate. Similarly Telegramo is not a compound word, but televido is.

Biologo might be considered not to be a compound word but Bio- and -ologo both have some generative power.

I find that the categories use in linguistics are often not capable of being applied with precision. There are cases where you can say that something is definitely an example of a something in a certain category, and then you can produce examples which may lead to dispute.

The category of kunmetita vorto in Esperanto seems clear, but try asking an Esperantist whether monotona is monoton-a or mono-ton-a, or dependi is depend-i or de-pend-i.

Perhaps 'hispangla' would count as a portmanteau word or 'espervangelizi'. Mi mem povas perfekte paroli la Esperantanglan kaj tre ŝatas espervangelizi.

You may hear portmanteau words used in Esperanto in informal exchanges but on whether there are portmanteau words in the dictionary, I'll take the fifth amendment.