Abbreviations and acronyms in English

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION   AND   SCIENCE OF UKRAINE

DRAHOMANOV NATIONAL PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY

 

                       THE   INSTITUTE   OF   FOREIGN  PHILOLOGY

THE GERMANIC AND COMPARATIVE LINGUSTICS DEPARTMENT

 

 

 

Abbreviations and acronyms in English

 

 

 

 

                                                                                              Term paper

                                                                                              Performed by

                                                                                              Sasha Darmohrai

                                                                                              Group 31 P

                                                                                             

Scientific   supervisor   :

  Kovalchuk I. M.                    

 

 

 

Kyiv - 2012

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I. 1. THEORETICAL PROBLEMS OF ABBREVIATIONS STUDYING

1.1. The notion of abbreviation

          1.2. Style conventions in English

          1.3. Measurement shorthand – symbol or abbreviation

          1.4. Syllabic abbreviation

Conclusion to the chapter I

 

CHAPTER II. PRACTICAL ANALYSIS OF  ACRONYMS AS ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR KIND OF ABBREVIATION

         2.2.Terminology

          2.3.Examples of different types of acronyms

          2.4.Acronyms in jargon

          2.5.Acronyms as legendary etymology

Conclusion to the chapter II

          CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

For English language is characteristic great quantitative growth of vocabulary and a noticeable qualitative change in the ways, means and methods of formation of lexical innovations. In our opinion, it is important to explore ways and mechanisms of formation of new lexemes, including  abbreviations.                                     

There are a lot of scientific papers about phenomenon of abbreviation.  For example,  Hongfang Liu has a work about abbreviations in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS); Peter D Stetson, Carol Friedman also have abbreviation studies.   But a permanent increase of the number of reduced lexemes and diversification of mechanisms of their formation  requires  more detailed study.  «Study of the reduce of the multiple phrases and its lexicalization, establishing of the role of abbreviations  is the urgent problem of modern of English.» [21, p. 25]

The significance of the paper.  Abbreviations, being the most productive lexical units and communicatively important in all spheres of human activity, are different on the one hand by resistance and on the other hand by mobility and variability. Development of abbreviations is quite dynamic aspect of lexicalization. And it is needed to study it deeply.

The aim of the work is to explore different types of acronyms and abbreviations; to identify peculiarities of their translation and usage in different fields. There are a following tasks in this research:

• To analyze the history of the study of abbreviations;
• To determine the meaning of abbreviations and acronyms in the vocabulary of modern English;
• To analyse the main types of acronyms and abbreviations;
• To consider different methods of formation of acronyms and abbreviations;
• To analyze the usage of acronyms, especially in slang;

The objects of the paper are abbreviations and acronyms in English language.

The subject of the paper is the usage of abbreviations and acronyms  in different fields.

THEORETICAL PROBLEMS OF ABBREVIATIONS STUDYING

An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase. For example, the word abbreviation can itself  be represented by the abbreviation  abbr., abbrv. or abbrev.

 «In strict analysis, abbreviations should not be confused with  contractions  or acronyms (including initialisms), with which they share some  semantic  and  phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in loose parlance.» [11, p. 167]. An abbreviation is a shortening by any method; a contraction is a reduction of size by the drawing together of the parts. A contraction of a word is made by omitting certain letters or syllables and bringing together the first and last letters or elements; an abbreviation may be made either by omitting certain portions from the interior or by cutting off a part. A contraction is an abbreviation, but an abbreviation is not necessarily a contraction. However, normally acronyms are regarded as a subgroup of abbreviations (e.g. by the Council of Science Editors).

Style conventions in English

In modern English there are several conventions for abbreviations, and the choice may be confusing. The only rule universally accepted is that one should be consistent, and to make this easier, publishers express their preferences in a style guide. Questions which arise include those in the following subsections.

Lowercase letters

If the original word was capitalised, then the first letter of its abbreviation should retain the capital, for example Lev. for Leviticus. When abbreviating words that are originally spelled with lower case letters, there is no need for capitalisation.

Periods (full stops) and spaces

A period (full stop) is sometimes written after an abbreviated word, but there are exceptions and a general lack of consensus about when this should happen.

«In British English, according to Hart's Rules, the general rule is that abbreviations (in the narrow sense that includes only words with the ending, and not the middle, dropped) terminate with a full stop (period), whereas contractions (in the sense of words missing a middle part) do not.» [11, p 167].

 

Example	Category	Short form	Source
Doctor	Contraction	Dr.	D-r
Professor	Abbreviation	Prof.	Prof…
The Reverend	Contraction or Abbreviation	Revd (Rev.)	Rev-d
The right Honourable	Contraction and Abbreviation	Rt Hon.	R-t Hon…

 

In American English, the period is usually included. In some cases periods are optional, as in either: 

US or U.S. - United States;

EU or E.U. - European Union; 

UN or U.N. - United Nations.

A third standard removes the full stops from all abbreviations. The U.S. Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices advises that periods should not be used with abbreviations on road signs, except for cardinal directions as part of a destination name.

For example:

Northwest Blvd - Northwest Boulevard

W. Jefferson - West Jefferson 

PED XING - pedestrian crossing.

Spaces are generally not used between single letter abbreviations of words in the same phrase, so one almost never encounters "U. S."

When an abbreviation appears at the end of a sentence, only one period is used: The capital of the United States is Washington, D.C.

«Abbreviations are similar in nature to blends, because both blends and abbreviations  are  amalgamations of parts of different words. Abbreviation has in common with  truncation and blending that it involves loss of material (not addition of material, as with affixation), but differs from truncation and blending in that prosodic categories  do not play a prominent role. Rather, orthography is of central importance. » [7, p. 160]

We will consider some following examples of formation of abbreviation.

«Abbreviations are most commonly formed by taking initial letters of multiword sequences to make up a new word:

Apart from words composed of initial letters, one can also find abbreviations that

incorporate non-initial letters:

 

 

Formally, some abbreviations may come to resemble blends by combining larger sets of initial and non-initial letters (e.g.  kHz). However, such forms still differ crucially from proper blends in that they do neither obey the three pertinent prosodic constraints, nor do they necessarily conform to the semantic property of blends described above.

The spelling and pronunciation of abbreviations may seem trivial, but nevertheless offers interesting perspectives on the formal properties of these words.

Consider the following abbreviations with regard to their spelling and pronunciation differences:

 

The orthographic and phonetic properties of the abbreviations are indicated in the following table. For some abbreviations there is more than one possibility:

 

Disregarding the cases where the abbreviation can trigger the regular pronunciation of the abbreviated words (a.s.a.p., e.g., etc.) and ignoring the use or non-use of dots, abbreviations can be grouped according to two orthographic and phonological properties. They can be either spelled in capital or in lower case letters, and they can be either pronounced by naming each individual letter.» [7, p 163]

Plural forms

To form the plural of an abbreviation, a number, or a capital letter used as a noun, simply add a lowercase s to the end.

• A group of MPs
• The roaring 20s
• Mind your Ps and Qs

To indicate the plural of the abbreviation of a unit of measure, the same form is used as in the singular.

• 1 lb or 20 lb.
• 1 ft or 16 ft.
• 1 min or 45 min.

When an abbreviation contains more than one full point, Hart's Rules recommends to put the s after the final one.

• Ph.D.s
• M.Phil.s
• the d.t.s

However, subject to any house style or consistency requirement, the same plurals may be rendered less formally as:

• PhDs
• MPhils
• the DTs. (This is the recommended form in the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors.)

According to Hart's Rules, an apostrophe may be used in rare cases where clarity calls for it, for example when letters or symbols are referred to as objects.

• The x's of the equation
• Dot the i's and cross the t's

However, the apostrophe can be dispensed with if the items are set in italics or quotes:

• The xs of the equation
• Dot the 'i's and cross the 't's

In Latin, and continuing to the derivative forms in European languages as well as English, single-letter abbreviations had the plural being a doubling of the letter for note-taking. Most of these deal with writing and publishing. A few longer abbreviations use this as well.

 

Singular abbr.	Singular Word	Plural abbr.	Plural Word	Discipline
d.	didot	dd.	didots	Typography
f.	following line of page	ff.	following lines of pages	notes
F.	folio	Ff.	folios	literature
h.	hand	hh.	hands	horse height
l.	line	ll.	lines	notes
MS	manuscript	MSS	manuscripts	notes
op.	opus	opp.	opera	notes
p.	page	pp.	pages	notes
P.	pope	PP	popes
Q.	quarto	Qq.	quartos	literature
s. (or §)	section	ss. (or §§)	sections	notes
v.	volume	w.	volumes	notes

Conventions followed by publications and newspapers

Many British publications follow some of these guidelines in abbreviation:

• For the sake of convenience, many British publications, including the BBC and The Guardian, have completely done away with the use of full stops or periods in all abbreviations. These include:
• Social titles, like Ms or Mr ;
• Two-letter abbreviations for countries ("US", not "U.S.");
• Words seldom abbreviated with lower case letters ("PR", instead of "p.r.", or "pr")
• Names ("FW de Klerk", "GB Whiteley", "Park JS"). A notable exception is The Economist which writes "Mr F. W. de Klerk".
• Scientific units (see Measurement below).
• Acronyms are often referred to with only the first letter of the abbreviation capitalised. For instance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation can be abbreviated as "Nato" or "NATO", and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome as "Sars" or "SARS" (compare with "laser" which has made the full transition to an English word and is rarely capitalised at all).
• Initialisms are always written in capitals; for example the "British Broadcasting Corporation" is abbreviated to "BBC", never "Bbc". An initialism is similar to acronym but is not pronounced as a word.
• When abbreviating scientific units, no space is added between the number and unit (100mph, 100m, 10cm, 10°C). (This is contrary to the SI standard; see below.)

Miscellaneous and general rules

• A doubled letter appears in abbreviations of some Welsh names, as in Welsh the double "l" is a separate sound: "Ll. George" for (British prime minister) David Lloyd George.
• Some titles, such as "Reverend" and "Honourable", are spelt out when preceded by "the", rather than as "Rev." or "Hon." respectively. This is true for most British publications, and some in the United States.
• A repeatedly used abbreviation should be spelt out for identification on its first occurrence in a written or spoken passage. Abbreviations likely to be unfamiliar to many readers should be avoided.

Measurement shorthand – symbol or abbreviation

Writers often use shorthand to denote units of measure. Such shorthand can be an abbreviation, such as "in" for "inch" or can be a symbol such as "km" for "kilometre".

The shorthand "in" applies to English only – in Afrikaans for example, the shorthand "dm" is used for the equivalent Afrikaans word "duim" [2] Since both "in" and "dm" are contractions of the same word, but in different languages, they are abbreviations. A symbol on the other hand, defined as "Mark or character taken as the conventional sign of some object or idea or process"[12] applies the appropriate shorthand by substitution rather than by contraction. Since the shorthand for kilometre (Quilômetro in Portuguese or Χιλιόμετρο in Greek) is "km" in both languages and the letter "k" does not appear in the expansion of either translation, "km" is a symbol as it is a substitution rather than a contraction.

In the International System of Units (SI) manual [8 ] the word "symbol" is used consistently to define the shorthand used to represent the various SI units of measure. The manual also defines the way in which units should be written, the principal rules being:

• The conventions for upper and lower case letters must be observed – for example 1 MW (megawatts) is equal to 1,000,000,000 mW (milliwatts).
• No periods should be inserted between letters – for example "m.s" (which is an approximation of "m·s", which correctly uses middle dot) is the symbol for "metres multiplied by seconds", but "ms" is the symbol for milliseconds.
• No periods should follow the symbol unless the syntax of the sentence demands otherwise (for example a full stop at the end of a sentence).
• The singular and plural versions of the symbol are identical – not all languages use the letter "s" to denote a plural.

 

Syllabic abbreviation

A syllabic abbreviation is an abbreviation formed from (usually) initial syllables of several words, such as Interpol = International + police. It is basically a variant of the acronym.

Syllabic abbreviations are usually written using lower case, sometimes starting with a capital letter, and are always pronounced as words rather than letter by letter.

Syllabic abbreviations should be distinguished from  portmanteaus, which combine two words without necessarily taking whole syllables from each.

Usage in different languages

Syllabic abbreviations are not widely used in English or French. The United States Navy, however, often uses syllabic abbreviations, as described below.

On the other hand, they prevailed in Germany under the Nazis and in the Soviet Union for naming the plethora of new bureaucratic organisations. For example, Gestapo stands for GeheimeStaats-Polizei, or "secret state police". Similarly, Comintern stands for the Communist International. This has caused syllabic abbreviations to have negative connotations (as in Orwell's Newspeak), notwithstanding that such abbreviations were used in Germany even before the Nazis came to power, e.g., Schupo for Schutzpolizei.

Syllabic abbreviations were also typical for the German language used in the German Democratic Republic, e.g. Stasi for Staatssicherheit ("state security", the secret police) or Vopo for Volkspolizist ("people's policeman").

 

Conclusion to the Chapter I

In the Chapter I we studied different conventions for abbreviations  in English, considered different variants of convention,  miscellaneous and general rules. We learned the notion of syllabic abbreviation. We find out, that Syllabic abbreviations are usually written using lower case, sometimes starting with a capital letter, and are always pronounced as words rather than letter by letter.