On 12/4/13, Robinson Tryon <bishop.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 4:38 AM, Tom Davies <tomc...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi :) >> To be more correct it should really be F.A.Q. and the dots would play >> even more havoc than spaces often do. Also we should always say >> G.N.U./Linux rather than Linux, G.N.O.M.E. and K.D.E. >> >> However as acronyms become used more frequently they gradually drop >> the dots and then drop the insistence of upper-case. FAQ is old and >> faq or Faq is likely to become quite common. > > Not to plunge too far down the linguistic rabbit-hole, but I believe > that initialisms only drop upper-case when they are in fact acronyms > that can be easily pronounced as words. Consider: > > GNU is seen as 'Gnu' sometimes, GNOME is often 'Gnome', LASER is > laser, but (IMHO) > NSA is still NSA, KDE is rarely Kde, and FAQ is rarely Faq. Even > though we could pronounce these last two "kiddy" and "fack," we > pronounce them as individual letters K-D-E and F-A-Q, just as we do > with F-D-O and others). > > But I digress...please ignore Tom and me as we go about our linguistic > jousting -- unless, of course, you find it as amusing as we do... :-) > > --R
I find this off-topic amusing ;-). This lexicalization of acronyms happens a lot in Spanish, too: apart from ‘láser’, which is an acronym-gone-word, we have ‘sida’ (Spanish for AIDS), ‘opa’ (or ‘Oferta Pública de Adquisición’, Spanish for business takeover), ‘epoc’ (Spanish for chronic obstructive lung disease, COLD)… -- Adolfo -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: l10n+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/l10n/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
