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Acronymy
4.6 Acronymy
Acronymy
is the process of forming new words by such as the names of social and
political organizations or special technical terms. Words formed in this
way are called initialisms
or acronyms,
depending on the pronunciation of the words.
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Initialism
4.6.1
Initialisms
Initialisms
are words pronounced letter by letter. In cases like A.D.(Anno
Domini = in the year after the birth of Jesus Christ), B.C.(Before
Christ) and C.O.D. (cash on delivery), the letters are separated by periods,
but most of them have no periods between the letters.
1.
Letters represent full words:
2.
Letters represent constituents in a compound or just parts of a word:
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Acronyms
6.2 Acronyms
Acronyms
are words formed from initial letters but pronounced as a normal word,
for example radar (radio detecting and
ranging), and WAVES (Women Appointed for Voluntary
Emergency Service), etc. More examples are as follows:
Some
acronyms are formed with the initial letter of the first word plus the
whole of the second, e.g.
Both
initialisms and acronyms have become very popular since the Second World
War and thus extremely productive. This is justified by the number of
such words collected in E. T. Crowley's Acronyms and Initialisms Dictionary.
The 1st edition which appeared in 1961 contains 12,000 entries; the 2nd
edition that came out in 1965 lists 45,000 entries and the 3rd edition
which was published in 1970 collects 80,000 entries, almost twice the
number in the second edition. With the advance of time, some of the words
may fall out of use whereas by far a greater number of words will be added.
Acronymy will undoubtedly remain an important contributor to contemporary
English vocabulary.
¢¢ Back-formation
4.7 Back-formation
Back-formation
is considered to be the opposite process of suffixation. As we know, suffixation
is the formation of new words by adding suffixes to bases, and back-formation
is therefore the method of creating words by removing/so-called the supposed
suffixes. This is because many of the removed suffixes are not true suffixes
but inseparable parts of the words. For example, it is a common practice
to add -er, -or, -ar to verb bases to form human nouns. Reasonably,
people make verbs by dropping the endings such as -or in editor,
and -er in butler. This is how we derive edit and
butle. Back-formation usually involves the following types of words:
1.
Abstract nouns
2.
Human nouns
3.
Compound nouns and others
4.
Adjectives
Words
created through back-formation are mostly verbs. There are only a few
that can be used as nouns or as both nouns and verbs, e.g. gloom
(n) from gloomy (a), greed (n) from greedy (a). Stylistically,
back-formed words are largely informal and some of them have not gained
public acceptance. Therefore, they should be used with care.
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