American abbreviations

[Benjamin Barrett]

That would seem to be difficult to support for Japanese, a language filled
with abbreviations.

It seems to me that an abbreviation in this context would have to be counted
as a word whose full form is known to the person knowing the abbreviated
form, so that for many speakers of English and Japanese, scuba is NOT an
abbreviation but PC (for personal computer) is.

Benjamin Barrett
Baking the World a Better Place
www.hiroki.us

> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society
> [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Arnold M. Zwicky
>
> one of the other fellows -- ok, Fellows -- here at the
> Stanford Humanities Center is a native speaker of Italian and
> has the impression that Englsh speakers, or at least American
> English speakers, use many more abbreviations of all types
> (alphabetisms, acronyms, truncations) in everyday speech than
> do speakers of Italian or the other languages she knows well
> (which include Japanese and Mandarin).  speakers of several
> other languages, including French and Spanish, were inclined
> to agree with her.
>
> she had in mind things like "PC" for "personal computer" and
> "politically correct", "ad" for "advertisement", etc.