Re: punctuated abbreviations // was english spelling reform

En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:

>
> 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.
>
In Dutch, "mevrouw", while originally meaning "Mrs.", i.e. a married woman, now
is used whatever the marital status, paralleling thus exactly the
masculine "meneer". The original term for unmarried women, "juffrouw"
(from "jong vrouw" IIRC) is now basically gone, except that it is still
sometimes used to refer to a female teacher of small classes (in which case
it's often shortened to "juf", and is used whatever the marital status too).
But it is not common anymore even in that use. I think this use of "mevrouw"
may still raise eyebrows from older people, but for people of the generation of
my boyfriend it's the normal use.

Christophe.

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