Acronyms and metanalysis

Text 4

Think of your own examples of derivation in English and Russian.

Express your opinion of the content and the expression- plane of the text.

Discuss the text in class.

Present a summary of the text.

Use the vocabulary practiced in tasks 1 and 3 to make up situations of your own.

Fill in the blanks. Use the text for reference.

Tasks

1. Find the Russian equivalents for the following words. word-combinations and sentences:

forming new words; a derivative; a bound base;

This process of making words is also an old and a productive one in English. Kindly, kindness, unkind are all derivatives of kind, as are liberal, liberty, and liberate of the bound base liber-. Kind and its derivatives are native English forma­tions, whereas the derivatives of liber- are loan-words from Latin and French and thus had been formed before they entered English.

Because the actual coinage of the latter group of words took place in another language, their parts are not as immediately obvious as those of native formations like kindness.

2. Find the English equivalents for the following words and word-combinations:

словообразование, заимствование, выбор, существующие выражения, продуктивный, сложные слова, образование новых слов

3. Explain the meaning of the following word-combinations and phrases:

a derivative, native English formations, loan-words, coinage, in origin

1. Another method of … new words is derivation.

2. A … is a word formed by adding affixes to another word or to a bound base.

3. Like compounding, derivation is a process of … that is still much used.

4. Other derivatives are formed because English speakers are … with an existing expression.

5. … to blends that are slips of the tongue, there are blends that have been deliberately created.

6. When our space program invented a combination of a balloon and a parachute to aid in the return of space capsules to earth, it was named ….

7. A few years ago a health-fad advocated the consumption of a half-and-half mixture of honey and cider vinegar, dubbed ….

8. Blends are not limited to single …. When the financial reporter for a small newspaper wrote that stocks had tumbled to a new time low, he apparently blended a new low with an all-time low.

5. Make your own list of key–units and topical vocabulary.

10. Choose any of the following topics to write an essay:

1) Interesting cases of derivation and borrowings in the English language.

2) New words in English.

3) Blends.

4) Compounding.

An acronym is always a deliberate creation. It is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters or syllables of several words and may be one of several kinds. The simplest type, the initialism, is an abbreviation of initial letters pronounced with the letter-names, for example, DNA, STP, LSD, GOP, TVA, GI, VP, PX, and the best known of all, OK. Initialisms are as old as the Roman inscription SPOR, from Senatus Populusque Romanus 'The Roman Senate and People,' and possibly much older. If the abbreviation consists of letters that can be pronounced collectively as a word, the result is the word acronym, for example, UNESCO /juntsko/ United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; HEW /hju/ (Department of) Health, Education, and Welfare; posh /pas/, explained as an acronym of 'portside out, starboard home,' with reference to desirable accommodations on ships sailing to India; and snafu /snaefu/, often euphemized as 'situation normal, all fouled up.' Snafu had a host of similar forms (including tarfu 'things are really fouled up,' fubar 'fouled up beyond all recognition,' sapfu 'surpassing all previous foul-ups'), which were once extremely popular, but are completely unknown to some younger speakers. It is unlikely that they will survive as permanent additions to our vocabulary. Some forms can be pronounced either as initial-isms or as word acronyms, for example, AWOL /e dAbaja o el/ or /ewal/ and UFO /ju ef o/ or /jufo/, although in derivatives like ufologist 'one who studies unidentified flying objects' the acronymic pronunciation is necessarily used.

Acronyms are popular as the names for organizations of various kinds. It is particularly fashionable for the acronym to spell out a word whose meaning is somehow appropriate to the organization. In many cases we may suspect that the organization was deliberately given a name with initials that form a memorable acronym. For example, WAC is a straightforward acronym from Women's Army Corps, but the Women Accepted for Voluntary Emer­gency Service were probably so called because the name yields the appropriate acronym, WAVES. Other names chosen with acronymic premeditation are CRASH for Citizens Rallying Against Slaughter on our Highways, UJOIN for the Union for Jobs and Income Now, CLEAN for California League to Enlist Action Now (an organization promoting censorship of literature), VISTA for Volunteers In Service To America, QUEST for Queens (New York) Educational and Social Team, AID for Agency for International Develop­ment, WAIF for World Adoption International Fund, HEP for Harlem Education Program, and DARE for either Developing Agricultural Resources Effectively or the Dictionary of American Regional English. Sometimes acronymic name-givers show a wry sense of humor, as with MANIAC for Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrater and Calculator, MISHAP for Missiles High-speed Assembly Program, and WAGGS for World Association of Girl Guides and Scouts. In other cases the humor is probably not intentional. It is doubtful that whoever named the Cooperative Occupational Training program for high schools thought ahead to what COT students might be called or that the bureaucrat who named the Latin American Free Trade Association intended to produce LAFTA.

As several of the preceding examples show, acronyms are not limited to the single initial letters of successive words; several letters or syllables may be taken from the beginning of a word, as in Comsat from Communications Satellite Corporation, or the well-known radar from "radio detection and ranging" and sonar from "sound navigation and ranging," the Comintern from Communist International, and the useful Amerind from American In­dian.

Acronymy is not a major source of additions to the vocabulary, but it is a colorful one much in vogue. Although acronyms have a long history, they became especially popular during the 1930's when the New Deal created a multitude of governmental agencies with names too long to pronounce in full. The military during the Second World War promoted their use, and thereafter many civil organizations took up the practice. The phenomenon is not limited to the United States or even to English; Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, and Israelis have all proved adept at the game of coining acronyms. Since bureaucratic conditions favor their use, we can probably look forward to a steady increase in their importance.

Compounding, derivation, blending, and acronymy have in common that they make a new word by combining two or more morphemes or fragments of morphemes. They are synthetic processes that make a word by building it up from several parts. The next two processes to be considered are analytic, that is, they make a new word by breaking down an older one. The simpler of the two is clipping, which is merely the shortening of a word. The older name for a medical charlatan is quacksalver, so called because fraudulent doctors made a great deal of noise about their ability while applying their salve. Because quacksalver was too long a term for easy use, it was shortened to quack. Clipped forms are fairly common in casual language: mike, photo, phone, gym, showbiz, and nuke 'nuclear bomb' are only a few of many possible examples. Sometimes the clipped form is altered slightly, either by a change of sound as in bike from bicycle or by the addition of an ending as in divvy from divide and ammo from ammunition. Some clipped forms are so well established in English that few speakers would guess their origin. Examples are fence from defense, used as early as 1330, mob from mobile vulgus 'the moveable crowd,' used in 1688, and (sports) fan from fanatic, formed as recently as 1889.

A more complex process is that which goes by the general name of metanalysis. The term is a blending of the prefix meta- 'altered' with the word analysis. As the name implies, it refers to an analysis of a word into parts, in the course of which the original structure of the word is altered. For example, another historically is a fusion of the two words an and other, but in current English it is a single word. However, speakers do sometimes divide it; and when they do so, the division is likely to be a and nother, thus altering the structure of the word. The metanalysis of another is not limited to the very young, the uneducated, or the casual. A very learned man who had just delivered a speech at a formal scholarly gathering replied to a question, "That would be a whole nother talk." Doubtless if he had been editing what he said, he would have changed it to something like, "That would be another talk altogether," or "a completely different talk," but in the spontaneous defense of his ideas he used a form that many other English speakers are also using. It is altogether possible that nother may take its place among words like newt and nickname, which acquired their n's in the same way, their older forms being an ewt and an ekename.

Icicle is a fused compound; it comes from Old English is-gicel, with the redundant meaning 'ice-icicle.' Historically the word should be divided ic-icle, but metanalysis as i-cicle has given rise to a new morpheme seen in popsicle or as an independent word in an advertisement for a machine that makes "eight sides at a time in your freezer." One enterprising inventor has been reported to be working on a way to manufacture beersicles. Sandwich is a single morpheme in current English, but metanalysis has made it possible in some restaurants to order a Jishwich. Plumber comes ultimately from the Latin word plumbum 'lead' and the suffix -arius 'pertaining to.' Since much pipe is made of lead, a person who worked with pipe was called a plumber. In English the word was a single morpheme, like carpenter (originally one 'having to do with wagons'). However, plumber was associated with agent nouns like builder from build, worker from work, and writer from write. Analogy then suggested the metanalysis of plumber into plumb and -er 'one who does the action of the preceding verb.' Thus a new verb to plumb 'work as a plumber, install pipes' came into existence, and it is not surprising to read of a prefabricated house, "The hull of the house is shipped in sections to the construction site already insulated, wired, and plumbed." The verb burgle has a similar history, as do edit and typewrite and a good many others. Some words formed by taking off a supposed or real affix include enthuse from enthusiasm, resurrect from resurrection, sidle from sidling 'sidelong,' pea from pease (the older form, which was mistaken as a plural, is preserved only in the nursery rime "Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold"), and unit from unity. This special kind of metanalysis is called back formation because it is the reverse of the usual process of derivation.

Borrowing and the kinds of word-making we have just looked at account for most of the new words that enter our language. Occasionally a word, like the technical term mho, has an oddly different origin. Ohm 'a unit of electrical resistance' was named for a German physicist, Georg Ohm. When electrical engineers needed a term for 'a unit of electrical conductance' which would be, as it were, the reverse of ohm, they simply reversed the spelling and pronunciation of ohm to produce mho /mo/.

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