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From: donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW)
Subject: Re: BTW, IMO acronyms are dumb and commie
Message-ID: <donhD43sxt.9Dz@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <D3yo4E.6Fz@news.cis.umn.edu>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 1995 17:37:04 GMT
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meus0001@maroon.tc.umn.edu (William E Meuse) skribis en lastatempa afisxo <D3yo4E.6Fz@news.cis.umn.edu>:
> 		BTW, IMO Acronyms Are Dunb and Commie
>
> Let me say that I oppose seeing our language eclipsed in such a 
>thought-obviating manner. English has been tortured enough over the 
>centuries, let's let it live in some dignity. One example of what it 
>could resemble if this trend continues is George Orwell's "duckspeak". 
>Another is Chinese.
> In Orwell's futuristic novel '1984' (published in 1948), "duckspeak" was 
>a language concocted by government agents to demand a minimum of 
>brain-activity from both speaker and listener. For example, "Miniprop" 

Possibly you are thinking of 'Newspeak'?

> My second example, Chinese, is self-explanatory. A mainland 
>Chinese-speaker's neural synapses are beaten into conformity with a 
>system that makes acronyms out of acronyms, then turns those acronyms 
>into more acronyms until there is a huge gap between what the speaker 
>says and what the speaker would say if he knew what he were saying. Even 
>our own term "acronym" is a Greek disguise for what would probably just 
>be called a "clipped-word" in native Germanic.

Since, as I understand it, an acronym is a word made up of the initial 
letters of a series of other words, perhaps someone more conversant with
Chinese than I am can explain how a language that doesn't use letters 
can create acronyms...

-- 
Don HARLOW			donh@netcom.com
Esperanto League for N.A.       elna@netcom.com (800) 828-5944
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/el/elna/elna.html         Esperanto
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/do/donh/donh.html 
