FAQ (was Re: TIPS)
Mark A. Mandel
mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU
Fri Jul 7 17:20:47 UTC 2006
I asked
> Shouldn't we have an FAQ? No, I'm not volunteering to compile it.
Ben Zimmer quipped:
>>>>>
Well, the first question in the FAQ obviously should be:
Should it be "Shouldn't we have an FAQ?" or "Shouldn't we have a FAQ?"?
<<<<<
Yeah (sigh). I normally say /faek/, but my speech recognition software is
most likely to understand that as "fact". But it recognizes /'ef'ey'kyuw/ as
"FAQ" without difficulty. -- That doesn't address what I had to do to get
those phonemic representations in here, but I've already set up macros for
that.
Do we have a term for expressions like this? That is, abbreviations formed
from initial letters and observed in the wild with both types of
pronunciation: acronymic and initialistic. The only other one I know of
offhand is ASAP, which I have heard pronounced /'ey,saep/ as well as
/'ey'es'ey'piy/.
Grant Barrett says:
>>>>>
Last time we tried to make one it turned out almost nobody volunteered to
compile it. In the stead of an ADS FAQ, I offer the following list. Nine out
of ten language questions from the public can be answered by these pages.
<<<<<
How about putting that list at the head of the "links" page? Or give it a
page of its own, called FAQ, and headed with a version of the above
paragraph.
-- Mark A. Mandel
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list