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

[Laurence Horn]

>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 Katz and Tanach (for the Old Testament) and so on; yes, for me
these are classic acronyms, along with I[CH][TH]YS for the
Christ/fish.

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

I wouldn't know where to begin on that one.

LH

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