The love to abbreviations (... and acronyms)
English speaking people use acronyms for everything:
for chatting: BTW, AFAIK, ASAP, ROLF;
for working: RSA, NQ, ISO, SAR, AMT;
People even make acronyms from their names: JFK;
All these acronyms turn my life crazy. The happy life of a non-native English speaker crashes at the acronyms wall. I am caused not only to study the English but also the huge amount of acronyms. As far as acronyms don't resemble words in the sense of etymology, learning acronyms becomes as boring as learning Chinese hieroglyphs. I would humble myself with this if there were a huge amount of Russian acronyms used everywhere and everyday, but there are NO. I can recall only few really Russian acronyms which are not the translation of the English ones. There is NO such a love to acronyms in Russia. So the question is: where the love to acronyms comes from in the English speaking countries?
Re: The love to abbreviations (... and acronyms)
Quote:
Originally Posted by it-ogo
Definition: Acronym is an abbreviation, which is pronounced as one word (not spelled).
According to this USA and USSR are not acronyms while LASER and SONAR are.
That's right, "abbreviation" is the thing we were really talked about.
Quote:
Originally Posted by it-ogo
IMHO they really make life easier.
The question is not stated as to use or not to use the abbreviations. If we focus on the Internet chatting: The question is why these abbreviations emerge in English as water drops while it rains and do not emerge in Russian (there are only few which are not the translations from English, while Russians really use Internet for chatting in Russian). By the way, what about other languages: French, German, ... .