Initialisms tend to have the stress patterns of phrases, so UN has the stress of black bird in “a crow is a black bird,” not of “blackbird” as the name of a species. On the other hand they are fixed collocations that have meanings like words do. I’ve noticed that for many speakers TV has become a compound, like blackbird, while for me and many other speakers it’s a phrase, like black bird.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of T. J. Ray
Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2011 11:54 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Word
Bob,
I still say RBI, but I hear more and more sports announcers
saying like "ribby."
tj
On Sunday 03/27/2011 at 10:45 am, Robert Yates wrote:
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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