Acronyms: English is inflected, too

[Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com]

Hi all,

Forgive me if this has already been
discussed.  I went back through the archives and didn't see anything
quite like it, but I admit that I may have missed it.

The current draft of the acronym proposal
speaks of translation issues when an acronym is translated into a language
that has inflection (Polish case is the example given).  But inflections
can be a problem even when the document is never translated, both inside
and outside the abbreviation.

Example in English:
<acronym id="html">
  <expanded>hypertext markup
language</expanded>
  <short>HTML</short>
</acronym>

Now consider the text: <p>A <acronym
href=""foo.xml#acronyms/html"/>" document contains a head and
a body.</p>

Depending on rules for ordering acronyms,
and whether this is the first appearance of the abbreviation, we might
get:
A hypertext markup language (HTML) document
contains a head and a body.
*A HTML (hypertext markup language)
document contains a head and a body.
*A HTML document contains a head and
a body.

The examples marked * will be unnatural
to the portion of English speakers who use a "soft H" to spell
out the letter.  Using "An" in the source paragraph would
sound pretentious or wrong for the alternate case:
*An hypertext markup language (HTML)
document contains a head and a body.
An HTML (hypertext markup language)
document contains a head and a body.
An HTML document contains a head and
a body.

It would appear that the author of the
re-using paragraph has to know deep information about the possible presentations
of the acronym.  English would be immune to this particular issue
if the abbreviation always came first, but it isn't always natural to order
the parts that way, and can we be sure that such a rule would protect every
language?

I can't tell if this is the same issue
as the Polish case case or not.  In the case of Polish, the abbreviation
itself changes its spelling.  In the case of English, the re-using
text that pulls the abbreviation is the one that has to be careful.

At the moment the only general solution
I can think of is "then don't do that", which feels pretty lame.

-- 
Deborah Pickett
Information Architect, Moldflow Corporation, Melbourne
Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com