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Robert LeChevalier scripsit: > The West shortened "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" to "Soviet > Union". I've never seen a comparable shortening in Russian, and SSSR > seemed to be spelled out a lot more than USSR was in the stuff I've seen. Say what? "Soviet Union" is a half-translation of "Sov'etskij Soyuz", certainly a common expression when I was learning Russian in 1976. > So long as the cmavo are a closed set, every word amongst them will cover a > range of meaning and hence be to some degree polysemous. Polysemy is more than covering a range of meanings: it is covering a *discontinuous* range of meanings, e.g. English "sound". _Ruka_ is monosemous even though it covers the domain of both "hand" and "arm". -- At the end of the Metatarsal Age, the dinosaurs John Cowan abruptly vanished. The theory that a single jcowan@hidden.email catastrophic event may have been responsible www.reutershealth.com has been strengthened by the recent discovery of www.ccil.org/~cowan a worldwide layer of whipped cream marking the Creosote-Tutelary boundary. --Science Made Stupid