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Comment by Feathercrown | Hacker News Reader

I dislike numeronyms. They may be shorter to type, but unlike acronyms, where the acronym itself is a valid pronounciation, numeronyms cannot usually be pronounced. The only way to know how is to know what the original word is, so you have to ask every time.

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It will never cease to be funny how inaccessible "a11y" is if you don't already know what it means. Mike Judge couldn't even make this stuff up.

Probably anorthography: a loss of the ability to write or to express thoughts in writing because of a brain lesion.

If you don't already know, you use a search engine to find out.

(Lack of an obvious pronunciation is a good objection, tho.)

That doesn’t change the fact that it is inaccessible for no gain.

It’s shorter to say (4 vs 6 syllables), and to write - how is that ‘no gain’?

False economy. The trade-off between "saving some syllables" and the concomitant problems it causes is not worth it.

To this day I don't know what Eli8 means, and I'm not going to even bother to look it up. It's not communication.

> To this day I don't know what Eli8 means, and I'm not going to even bother to look it up. It's not communication.

My first guess would have been a username for somebody named Elliot. Given that it occurred in this thread, probably not a correct guess.

Communication requires thought and input from both sides - if I use a numeric abbreviation with someone who is unfamiliar with it, I am communicating badly.

I think where we differ is that I see such abbreviations as no worse than any other - TLAs (three letter acronyms) can also be as impenetrable.

I always thought you'd still pronounce it as the original word. How do you pronounce it? Aeleveny?

Yep - pretty-much, aye-el-ev-en-why although I may have miscounted the syllables in eleven in my parent post.

It's most pronounced in aye-ate-een-en, internationalization is a word I find myself stumbling when saying in full.

What?!?! I have never heard anyone pronounce these terms in such a ludicrous fashion, and it’s not because I don’t have exposure I do a fair amount of work in this space.

I have never heard any of those pronounciations.

>(Lack of an obvious pronunciation is a good objection, tho.)

ally?

Or the writer could keep their writing more accessible by using the word accessibility, understood by hundreds of millions of people, instead of some meme term understood by maybe thousands.

I18n is 4 syllables, internationalisation 7. It may not be pronounceable, but many abbreviations are not, and it’s still faster.

But yes, like every abbreviation, do use the full word the first time you use it “Considering the topic of internationalisation (i18n)…”

Indeed, it is strictly worse than an abbreviation made by removing the medial part, e.g. intl'n or acc'y, because numeronyms only keep the first and last character.

My kates auth zen operator doesn’t support I ate teenen.

It works ok as long as there’s nobody named Katherine.

eye teen n

I shit you not, the reason I have heard that they are more "accessible" is because the words that get shortened are hard to spell.

I assume the real reason is because each of these indecipherable glyphs is a s8h* to identify the "cool" and "woke" (not in the US politics sense but in a more general sense of the word) crowd from the rest.

* If you don't know this word, you're not in the club

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