On Mon, 18 Jul 2005 02:06:01 -0400, suzmccarth <suzmccarth@...>
wrote:
[...]

> " ... the result would be too strange and involve too many changes in
> the established spelling habits to be accepted by the literate part of
> the speech community."
> Coulmas. Writing Systems of the World. 1989. p. 256.

My reaction, well said.

I hope to catch up with this thread before it vanishes into past memory.
Unread backlog is roughly 1,500 messages this month.

I had an e-mail tussle on another non-linguistic List with my contention
that the two-letter postal codes are not abbreviations. Even the US Postal
Service, being realists, "gave in" and now refers to them as
"abbreviations". I contend that anyone with a decently-developed "literary
sense" (uncommon in our current society) will not regard them to be
abbreviations at all.

Term, discovered in the Opera 8 browser config. interface: Anonym, not an
abbreviation. Quick online definition not helpful. Seems that this might
be the term I'm looking for, namely, non-pronounceable initialisms
(Richard Lederer's term for non-pronounceable* "clustered capitals") *By
non-linguists
(My "war cry", in a losing battle, is that "It's not an acronym if you
can't say it!")

Point about that "losing battle" is that catchy terms/initialisms such as
"acronym", "baud", "watts RMS" and the truly-awkward "PCMCIA" sometimes
grab the ear of the public, who really don't give a fig, for the most
part, about technical accuracy. The latter three are technical, and are
all misused, almost always, in various ways. (Off-list corresp. fine;
just please put "[off-list]" in the Subject line. That grabs my attention!)

Regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. (Not "MA")
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
Hope for these times: Paul Rogat Loeb's book --
"The Impossible Will Take a Little While:..."