SL and other codes: in passing: Russian

[Helle Lohmann]

Hi,

don´t want to steal your time, but Mark says

>>> If I read a Russian paper on spoken languages, I would have no right to complain that (transliterated) "nemeckii" doesn't resemble the English word "Hungarian"

Well, my Russian used to be better some years ago, but does "nemeckii" not mean "German"? Interestingly, literally / etymologically "ne"-"meckii" means "those who don´t / cannot speak (spoken language)". At least that´s what I remember to be teached.


Impressed,
Helle Lohmannb


"Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at ldc.upenn.edu> schrieb: "Lorraine Leeson"   wrote:

>But why do the acronyms need to be transparent?? This doesn't seem to
>be a necessary condition of naming!

As someone else has said, codes are codes and don't need to be memorable. 
But there's a reason that, say, my university ID has a name form (mamandel) 
as well as a number. If you're reading a comparative paper on, say, namesign 
forms in SLs around the world, do you want to have to keep a cheat sheet 
handy to know which one each code refers to? I don't.

And as for the other complaint, that these terms are English-based: We are 
writing here in English. If I read a Russian paper on spoken languages, I 
would have no right to complain that (transliterated) "nemeckii" doesn't 
resemble the English word "Hungarian" -- or, for that matter, the Hungarian 
word "Magyar" (acute accent on the 2nd "a"). Codes are not language-based, 
but names and abbreviations are. It would not be unfair for English-language 
abbreviations (NOT codes!) for SLs to be English-based.

But it would be polite for writers to introduce the abbreviations on first 
use in a paper, as is typically done in biomedical text with abbreviations 
for genes, proteins, diseases, and so on.

m a m
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