LINGUIST List 2.280

Monday, 10 June 1991

FYI: Airfares, Lakoff, Acronyms

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , CHEAP IJCAI91 AIRFARES AVAILABLE BUT NOT FOR LONG
2. The LINGUIST Editors, Lakoff bibliography in LaTeX
3. Ellen Prince, Re: Responses: Diacritics and Acronyms
4. , Hebrew Acronyms

For those of you planning to attend IJCAI-91 in Sydney, Australia, it
may be important to know that there are extremely discounted
round-trip airfares to/from the US and Sydney available right now.
Both Continental and Northwest are offering $685 (+ tax = $703)
round-trip fares from JFK and Newark. Both these fares *expire soon*
(Continental on June 7th and Northwest the following week) so, if
you're interested in taking advantage of the savings, call your travel
agent immediately!

Your local travel agent should have further details and be able to make the
arrangements for you.

I DON'T HAVE ANY OTHER INFORMATION, SO PLEASE DO ***NOT*** CONTACT ME.

William Rapaport has kindly posted a bibilography of articles citing
Lakoff's _Women, Fire and Dangerous Things_. This is available
by sending listservuniwa.uwa.oz.au (NOT Listservtamvm1)
the message:
 get lakoff-bibliography

daniel radzinski writes that an acronym source for katz and segal might
be a folk etymology, the evidence for that being that these names do not
exist outside of eastern european jewry. while he might of course be right,
i'd like to point out that it is typical for jews to take names that are
phonologically and even apparently morphologically consistent with the
languages of the countries in which they reside. thus it is conceivable that
katz/segal are indeed acronyms but were invented in eastern europe exactly
BECAUSE they fit in so well with a germanic system. also remember that family
names are a very late phenomenon, nearly a millenium later than the dispersion
of the jews. except for those who eventually took their LABEL 'cohen', 'levi',
'israel'... as their family name, we would be very surprised indeed if we found
the same family names among jews of very different regions, acronym or not.
for example, my impeccably germanic maiden name, friedman(n), has the same
origin--solomon/shlomo/shalom '[man of] peace'--as the oriental jewish family
name suleiman--but each fits into the language of the land in which it was
used. likewise, the oriental/sephardic family name 'azoulay' is (according to
an egyptian jewish friend with that name) a hebrew acronym, but one that fits
perfectly into the system of the lands in which IT was invented and used.

I fully agree with Daniel Radzinski's suggestion that many if not
most Jewish names which are etymologized as Hebrew acronyms must
also be considered in light of their apparent non-Hebrew etymologies.
E.g., Katz is not just the acronym for kohen tzedek, but also the
Germanic word for 'cat'. A piece of evidence for this is that
acronymic folk etymologies are often offered in that culture for
words whose etymology is obscure, e.g. yeke 'a pejorative term for
a German Jew' is often explained as standing for yehudi kshe-havana
'a Jew hard of understanding', which is probably fanciful.
Daniel's argument that otherwise we would expect names like Katz
to also occur among Jews of other parts of the world is perfectly
reasonable. However, it also seems to me that, rather than assuming
that these names originally were just what they seem to be in German
and were then folk-etymologized, I would think that at least some
of them were deliberate puns from the beginning.

[End Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 0280]