Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 16:18:01 +0200 (CEST) From: Salvo Bartolotta <bartequi@neomedia.it> To: "Deborah G. Lidl" <deborah.lidl@windriver.com> Cc: doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: <acronym> Message-ID: <998835481.3b8905195df3a@webmail.neomedia.it>
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> On Fri, Aug 17, 2001 at 07:36:35PM +0100, Nik Clayton said: > > On Fri, Aug 17, 2001 at 06:32:59PM +0100, Mark Ovens wrote: > > > > An acronym is anything formed from (typically the initial) letters from > > > a phrase. > > > > > > ...that forms a word (either real or contrived), so BIOS and SCSI are > > > acronyms, but IDE isn't (unless you pronounce it "eyed"), and neither is > > > PCI, IBM, etc. > > > > What're things like "IDE" referred to then? > Initialisms. One of the first references that Google provided was the > Dr. Grammar FAQ: > http://www.drgrammar.org/faq.cfm#25 > Of course, the Merriam-Webster dictionary said an initialism is an ^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^ > acronym made up of the initial letters of a set of words. ^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^ By the way, according to the New Oxford Dictionary of English (Pearsall, 1998), an initialism is "an abbreviation consisting of initial letters pronounced separately (e.g. BBC)." As its etymology also shows (onyma ~ name), an acronym is a word. How can an initialism be an acronym, ie a "word"? :-) In "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language", by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik, Longman, 1985, the authors distinguish (cf clipping, acronyms, blends, and in particular I.75): 1) <blockquote>acronyms which are pronounced as a sequence of letters (also called 'alphabetisms'), eg C.O.D, are most like ordinary abbreviations and hence most peripheral to word-formation. In writing, the more institutionalized formations have no period between the letters. The use of capitals is not determined solely by whether the items abbreviated are proper nouns.</blockquote> 2) <blockquote>acronyms which are pronounced as a word, eg NATO, are often used without our knowing what the letters stand for.</blockquote> IIRC, "alphabetism", a (comparatively rare) technical term, was first used by David Crystal. An on-line example can be found at: http://www.ling.nwu.edu/~jbh/a10/morph2.html. This page contains a further distinction (alphabetism vs. acronym). In this connection, the alt.usage.english FAQ file may be an interesting reading (eg the DISPUTES section). It can be retrieved at http://www.ucle.org/aue/full_faq_with_int_links.shtml#tcrecomm. Another couple of on-line references: http://www.ucc.ie/info/net/acronyms/acro.html and in particular, http://www.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym?IDE (!) :-) As you can see, the definitions given by dictionaries -- including the ones I quoted in an earlier post -- tend to simplify the matter. Rather than create an "initialism" or "alphabetism" tag, the "best" policy might be to use the acronym tag in order to cover both cases. FreeBSD documentation is not intended for linguists; besides, great linguists/scholars, such as Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik, do use "acronym" in a general sense. That's just my .02 Euro. Incidentally, there may be a... geographical issue. For instance, in Italy, IDE is pronounced as a word, so it's an acronym in the strict sense of the, er, word. :-) -- Salvo To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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