acronym (was re: uniting two old threads...)

[James A. Landau]

Just to add to the complications of this issue:

Do you accept as acronyms the practice in Hebrew of taking the initial consonants of a phrase and inserting enough /ah/ vowels to make the thing pronounceable?  e.g. "Zve Haganah l'Yisroel" (the Israeli armed forces, literally "force defense for Israel" becomes abbreviated as "ZHL" and pronunced as /zahal/.

And how do you classify "gung ho", which is extracted/assembled from the Chinese phrase "Zhongguo Gongye Hezuo She"?

    - Jim Landau

_____________________________________________________________
Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org