Just some observations about initialisms to words.

In English, UN is still the initial; however in French UNO is a word.

The same is true for UFO; also a word in French and German.

On the other had, there is the case of RBI.  Do you pronounce the
letters or is it a word for you?

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri

>>> "T. J. Ray" <[log in to unmask]> 03/27/11 6:27 AM >>>
Herb,
I appreciate your response.  Can't find anything in it to disagree
with at all.  My
curiosity involves how many different ways people define "word" in
daily life.
You touched on the way linguists use the term, leaving us with the
conclusion
that "the President of the United States" is one word.  Teachers
assigning
100-word essays to students would more likely count that example as
six
words.  Dictionary makers are very spotty in whether they include
items
with more than word word in them.

I'm also curious as to the transition from using the words for the
letters (GP,
RADAR) to seeing the grouping as a standalone entity where the
individual
words are not being thought of.  (Yes, that is a terrible sentence!)
As many times
as folks refer to the United Nations as "the UN," I've yet to hear
anyone say "UN"
as a word.

Thanks.

tj



On Saturday 03/26/2011 at 11:00 pm, "STAHLKE, HERBERT F"   wrote:
>
>
> Without getting into some difficult and probably not entirely relevant

> linguistic issues, there is a linguistic definition of word that goes
> back to Leonard Bloomfield, the author of what was for decades a
> standard text on linguistics.  He describes a word as a “minimal
> free form,” that is, the smallest portion of an utterance that can
> be pronounced in isolation without changing it phonologically or
> morphologically.  Thus in a spoken sentence like
>
> The ball’s in play.
> [D@ ‘bOlz Im ‘pleI]  (ASCII IPA with spaces for clarity)
>
> For an English speaker who is not specifically phonetically trained
> and behaving like a linguist, the minimal parts of this utterance that

> can be pronounced in isolation without changing their phonetic or
> morphological form are [‘bOl] “ball” and [‘pleI] “play.”
> If phonetically untrained native speakers try to pronounce the
> unstressed syllable [D@] “the” by itself they will say either
> [‘DV] or [‘Di], stressing either form, because any isolated
> one-syllable utterance in English must be stressed.  By Bloomfield’s
> definition, only “ball” and “play” would be words.  “the,”
> “’s,” and “in” would be something linguists call
> “cliticized forms,” that is, unstressed forms that attach to
> stressed forms.  (There’s more to clitics than that, but it’s
> mostly not relevant here either.)
>
> I suspect this is not what you meant by your question, though.  I
> think you are asking rather how something people say gets some sort of

> official recognition as a word.   Most dictionary writers have a
> strong descriptivist streak in them, and they allow usage to determine

> what is a word.  If an acronym like “radar” begins to appear in
> print enough, then they will include it as a word, perhaps adding a
> usage marker of some sort.  The same holds for initialisms (LOL), loan

> words (sushi), slang (cool), and other sorts of new words.  Different
> dictionaries will have different standards by which they determine
> whether to include something as a new word, which means that there are

> lots of words out there that aren’t yet acknowledged by an authority
> like a dictionary.
>
> Herb
>
>
>
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of T. J. Ray
> Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2011 8:36 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: The Word
>
> With dictionaries beginning to add items such as LOL to their listings

> of words,
>
> it might be a good time to pose the question What is a word?
>
>
>
> Granted that aconyms have been comi> loran, radar, sonar, snafu, jeep, kayo, veep, emcee, and others.  In
> most of such
>
> instances, the new "word" is a blending of the individual letters and
> is pronounced
>
> as a single lexical unit.  Do LOL and such texting shortcuts qualify?

> When one
>
> sees LOL, isn't the mental response a return to "laugh out loud"?
> Words such
>
> as jeep don't (at least any longer) evoke "general purpose."
>
>
>
> I look forward to your feedback.
>
>
>
> tj
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