Research on Signed/Spoken Language Code switching

[Mark A. Mandel]

"Lorraine Leeson" <leesonl at gmail.com>  wrote:

>But why do the acronyms need to be transparent?? This doesn't seem to
>be a necessary condition of naming!

As someone else has said, codes are codes and don't need to be memorable. 
But there's a reason that, say, my university ID has a name form (mamandel) 
as well as a number. If you're reading a comparative paper on, say, namesign 
forms in SLs around the world, do you want to have to keep a cheat sheet 
handy to know which one each code refers to? I don't.

And as for the other complaint, that these terms are English-based: We are 
writing here in English. If I read a Russian paper on spoken languages, I 
would have no right to complain that (transliterated) "nemeckii" doesn't 
resemble the English word "Hungarian" -- or, for that matter, the Hungarian 
word "Magyar" (acute accent on the 2nd "a"). Codes are not language-based, 
but names and abbreviations are. It would not be unfair for English-language 
abbreviations (NOT codes!) for SLs to be English-based.

But it would be polite for writers to introduce the abbreviations on first 
use in a paper, as is typically done in biomedical text with abbreviations 
for genes, proteins, diseases, and so on.

m a m
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