LINGUIST List 4.474

Wed 16 Jun 1993

Qs: Acronyms, Phoneme Co-occurrences, Readability

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1. , Acronyms
2. Swann Philip, Query: phoneme co-occurence frequency
3. "Bethany Dumas, UTK", Need diskette versions of readability tests

This message is partly inspired by the recent discussions on acronyms.
I don't know what to call these phenomena, but does anyone have a
collection of examples such as the following well known instances in
the UK and Ireland:

a) PIN Number (PIN=Personal ID Number, i.e. the number you type in
 during transactions with cashpoint machines to verify
 that you really are who you say you are ...)

b) AIB Bank (AIB=Allied Irish Bank)

where we see that the final initial in the acronym is redundant, as it
is mentioned again in the following word! We can oppose these with examples
which (to my knowledge) are never found, such as:

c) *VAT tax (VAT=Value Added Tax, i.e. a purchase tax).

What about "DAG graph" (in NLP terms), which I came across once (but didn't
like)?

I would be interested in any examples you may have from other regions, as well
as more of the same from our part of the world!

Many thanks,

Andy Way.

I'm looking for a transition frequency matrix for phonemes
in English and/or any other common languages. Also, if anybody
knows of software that can process raw data to produce such
a matrix, I'd be most interested.

Philip Swann
University of Geneva

I have a need for both DOS-based and Macintosh versions of standard
readability tests (Gunning, etc.). Please reply directly; I'll
summarize to LINGUIST. Thanks. Bethany Dumas (dumasbutkvx.bitnet)