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Acronyms and vocabulary building

From:Caleb <cph9fa@...>
Date:Wednesday, August 11, 2004, 2:41
At my job, we have tons of acronyms that we use daily, such as JMPS,
UPC, GBU, WCMD, SLMR, CWDS, DTD, DTM,... You get the picture. In my
conlanging time, I was trying to decide if I could come up with a way
to have a conlang morphology based on acronyms, but I couldn't think
of anything intuitive.

Then I decided instead to create vocabulary items out of accronyms!

1) Find a simple phrase and convert it to an acronym, either by
initial letter or by initial phoneme.

2) If there are any vowels, you may keep them in place, _or_ convert
them to consonants, using the following mapping: a -> h,  i,e -> y,
o,u -> w.

3) Replace any phonemes that don't occur in your language with
similar ones that do (e.g. /dZ/->/Z/, /l/->/r/). Also, optionaly
replace some common letters with new ones that don't exist in
English, but that do in your conlang (just to mix things up a bit).

4) Add random vowels in between the consonants, and decide where to
place the stress.

5) Make any further modifications to meet the criteria of your
language (e.g. assimilation of adjacent consonants, or adding a final
nasal to a word if all words of that class were required to end in a
nasal)

The following examples are a hypothetical conlang:

Example 1:
1) Joint Mission Planning Software -> jmps
2) N/A - no vowels
3) /dZ/ -> /Z/, Zmps (but we can still spell it with a 'j')
4) /Zimposa/
5) N/A

/Zimposa/ = "A mission or task."

Example 2:
1) Unified Planning Component -> upc
2) wpc
3) wpk
4) /wopaku/
5) N/A

/wopaku/ -> v.t. "To plan."

"wopaku jimposa" = "To plan a mission"

If you don't have an acronym handy to use, make one up. For "grass"
we could have 'small green plant' -> 'sgp' -> 'asgapu' and for apple,
we could have 'round tasty red fruit' -> 'rtrf' -> 'rutirf'.

~Caleb