Re: punctuated abbreviations // was english spelling reform

Tim May wrote:
>
>Andreas Johansson writes:
>  > Nik Taylor wrote:
>  > > > though I have seen "Ms."... I guess no vowel makes it look like an
>  > > > abbreviation for something unwritable
>  > >
>  > >Well, as I understand it, Ms. is derived from Mrs.
>  >
>  > It is? And I thought it meant "Miss" ... ?
>  >
>
>It doesn't mean either.  The point behind "Ms" is that with only the
>terms "Mrs" and "Miss", it's impossible to refer to a woman by means
>of an honorific without specifying her marital status.  This was felt
>to be discriminatory, and "Ms" (pronounced, in my experience, /mIz/ or
>/mz/) was introduced as a direct counterpart of the male "Mr".  It was
>coined in 1949, but didn't become popular until the '70s.
Makes kinda sense, I guess, but /mIz/ sure sounds alot like "Miss", doesn't
it?

Reminds me of a thing that felt very funny the first few weeks of German
classes this semester; Our earlier teachers usually addressed as with
personal name, but the new batch prefer honorific plus family name.
Evidently, "Fräulein" isn't PC anymore, so the girls get refered to as "Frau
Forslin" (or whatever), which for me, used to map "Fräulein" to Swedish
"fröken" and "Frau" to "fru", sounded very funny addressed to decidely
unmarried twenty-year-olds. But you get used to anything, I guess.

                                            Andreas

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