American abbreviations

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:21 PM -0700 10/7/05, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>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.
>
More generally, acronyms tend to qualify as words.  Initialisms don't
obviously do so.  (Another reason to preserve the distinction in
nomenclature.)

Larry