This convention is very wide-spread in Esperanto circles, where speakers must obviously deal with many different naming systems. (It’s more common in periodicals and correspondence than books, I’d say.)
So it might say, “La c^efministro KOIZUMI J^unic^iro de Japanio renkontis la usonan prezidenton George W. BUSH…”
(Since the prime minister’s name is written in a non-Latin script, it would be transcribed using Esperanto phonetics, thus J^unic^iro. The circumflexes should be on the preceding consonants.)
I think there’s a general tendency for acronyms to be capitalized in British publications. I’ve seen references to “Nasa”, for example. I assume the deal is that they’ve become regular words, essentially, and simply happen to be proper nouns in a lot of cases. Whereas in English we just tend to keep the ALL-CAPS look for a longer time.
Now that’s just plain wrong. You can use snafu instead of SNAFU because it’s just a word and you can argue evolution of the language. But NASA is not only an acronym, it’s the name of the organization, and you shouldn’t call it Nasa any more than you should refer to Ibm, the Eu, or gReat bRitain.
I don’t agree that it’s the same thing. I’m fully in favor of Nasa, Uncitral, Unicef, etc. If you’re pronouncing it as a word, then I think it’s perfectly legitimate to treat it as a word. Yeah, the proper name is the National Aeronautics and Space Adminstration, but we’re talking about a nickname anyway. “Nasa” is at least as good as (and in my mind is better than) “NASA.”
If you’re still pronouncing it as initials, though, then I agree with you, except that I would preserve the periods – I.B.M., E.U., etc.
It’s house style in some UK newspapers and magazines to only capitalise the first letter in an acronym if the word is pronounceable, hence Nasa but IBM. That’s when the acronym is well known of course and doesn’t need to be explained. From here:
abbreviations
Spell out less well-known abbreviations on first mention; it is not necessary to spell out well-known ones, such as EU, UN, US, BBC, CIA, FBI, CD, Aids, Nasa
Use all caps only if the abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters; otherwise spell the word out: the BBC, ICI, VAT, but Isa, Nato
Sure, but look at their logo and the way they refer to their own organization. If e.e. cummings and eBay can specify their own capitalization, why can’t NASA (and FEMA and PETA and NOW and other groups with pronouncable acronyms) do the same?
And I see your point on this, acsenray, but I would hardly call NASA a “nickname.” It’s by far the most commonly-used name for the organization, and they use it extensively on their own Web site, press releases, and so forth. Even if it is just a nickname, don’t they have the right to choose their own nickname? I’m not calling you “Ascenray” or “ascenRay” because that’s not how you chose to capitalize your nickname. Let’s offer NASA and all the others the same courtesy.
Logos are not language. I don’t take cues on capitalization from them. Really, there is an astonishing number of companies who write their logos in all caps. Following that rule, you’d be all-capping names all over the place. Ridiculous.
So far as I know, Cummings himself used proper capitalization. It was a publisher’s stylistic choice on cover art to lowercase everything. Cummings’s own wife disputed the claim that Cummings had expressed a wish that his name always be written in lowercase.
They can do whatever they want with their names when they write them. Similarly, we can do whatever they want with their names when we write them.
I see it as a matter of language usage and style, not of some kind of fundamental right to self identification. First of all, Nasa is not a human being, so I don’t recognise any rights to dignity or identity.
From where I come from, people don’t get to choose their own nicknames. A nickname is what someone else chooses to call you.
I wouldn’t care one way or the other if you did. “Acsenray” is not my name. In any case, were I to use it in a sentence (as I do here), I would use proper capitalization rules.
So far as I am concerned, it is a matter of language usage, not one of courtesy. And only a person has a claim to courtesy in my view.
Going back to my dealing in Postal History, I think it came about when the USPOD (United States Post Office Department) started requiring “return addresses” on commercial mail (c. 1870?) and the printed return addresses done by the USPOD were in “all caps” for legibility. (The USPOD did the printing for almost nothing in order to encourage this - about 25 cents per box of 500 envelopes).
That is an excellent article. Thank you for pointing me at it. After reading and considering it and your prior post, I’ll concede most of the points you made. But not all.
Grownups do, indeed, choose their own nicknames. People hang nicknames on when we’re kids, but if we don’t choose to adopt the nicknames ourselves, they tend to go away when everyone grows up.
Despite the excellent arguments you make concerning courtesy, corporations, and logos (I should never have mentioned logos), I still feel that there’s a reason to capitalize acronyms. It points out that they are acronyms, and I consider that to be useful information. That’s what proper style and language usage are all about: conveying information.
Mrs. Napier, an avid and very serious genealogist, reports that older genealogical records generally use caps for the first letter of the first name and all letters of the last name. This actually sounds like a bad idea to me, because sometimes genealogical sluthing pays attention to tiny little details and clues. I’d think they’d care about the case of letters inside the last name, like MacArthur versus Macarthur.