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Comment by mrkstu | Hacker News Reader

UK's grammar rules differ from the United States- they don't capitalize acronyms. i.e. NASA becomes Nasa.

From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_in_English#Capi...):

>Generally acronyms and initialisms are capitalized, e.g., "NASA" or "SOS." Sometimes a minor word such as a preposition is not within the acronym, such as "WoW" for "World of Warcraft". In British English, only the initial letter of an acronym is capitalized if the acronym is read as a word, e.g., "Unesco."

Genuine question, do normal people pronounce ARM as "Arm" (like the limb) as in /ɑːrm/ or /ɑːm/, or do they pronounce it like A.R.M as in each letter individually.

I've always said ARM (as in each individual letter) when talking about ARM processors and it's never even occured to me to pronounce it like Arm.

That being said... I do pronounce RISCV as /rɪsk-viː/ (or, as I believe was the intention rɪsk-faiv depending who I am talking to) and that seemed entirely normal as opposed to pronouncing each letter in the Acronym...

So maybe I'm just weird here...

The company and CPU name has always been pronounced 'arm' like the body part.

In English, I usually just say it as the body part. In French, however, I would pronounce every letter separately.

My general rule is to pronounced any three letter Capitalised term as individual characters, so A/R/M and S/Q/L.

Since RISC-V is longer I pronounced it the same as you; /rɪsk-viː/, the same as to NASA and NATO.

Yeah, it's pronounced like the limb, and always has been, at least in English-speaking countries. Hence the StrongARM pun.

Some additional bit of trivia: in Portuguese, you capitalize every letter for any acronyms of length <= 3 or those which you pronounce each letter separately like HTML. Having said that, for foreign names like NASA, you follow the original country's grammar rules so we'd never write Nasa

> UK's grammar rules differ from the United States- they don't capitalize acronyms.

They don't call themselves the Uk, do they?

That's because UK isn't pronounced as a word, it's pronounced as an acronym - yoo kay, so both letters are capitalised. If it was pronounced as a word - yuck perhaps - only the first letter would be capitalises.

An acronym is pronounced as a word. You mean initialism.

I can't say that I've ever noticed that to be generally true, but I'll certainly be looking out for it now.

The only time Brits capitalise the entire acronym is if we are worried about confusing Americans.

Which is always, is it not?

Almost never, actually.

I don't think it is /generally/ true - it's certainly in a bunch of style guides (e.g. The Guardian says Nato) but not in others (e.g. Plain English Campaign says NATO). I'd be amazed if there was an actual grammatical "rule" about this, mind.

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