Re: OT: which article with abbr. ?

[mje@xxxxxxxx]

   Hallo - I haven't posted here for ages, but I thought I'd come
in on this a little.


[Patricia M. Godfrey:]
> All these patterns of pronunciation are important, because how such a
> term is pronounced determines the form of the indefinite article....
   I find things like this quite interesting - although I don't
quite know why.
   But I wish that Britain and Australia (the latter of which is
where I live) retained the use of full-stops for abbreviations in the
way that the U.S. seems to have done. I was educated to use
full-stops more than people commonly use in Australia today, and I
perversely continue with that because I think it's both correct and
clear, and my usage in this is pretty well similar to U.S. practice.
   There used to be this thing about using full-stops for
abbreviations, but not for contractions, and the difference seemed to
hang on whether the last letter of the shortened form was the same as
the last letter in the full word, which always struck me as a quite
useless distinction to use for governing usage in this. I think my
school did teach this distinction, but I later dropped it in favour of
using full-stops for both, after going through a careless period where
I was quite lazy and inconsistent about it. (After I reformed from
this lazy period, I believed I recalled that the school taught
full-stops for all short forms - but then I came across examples of
writing I did at the time where "Mr." was consistently written as
"Mr", and I then realized I must have misremembered that; that false
memory was at the time one of my main reasons for re-adopting (as I
thought) this practice. Still, by the time I realized I'd
misremembered, I'd well and truly adopted the use of full-stops for
things like "Mr.", and saw no reason to change from that, since I
think it's better anyway.)
   But nowadays in Australia (and I think Britain too) the
full-stop is commonly left out for most shortened forms, of either
type. However, I believe it is worth retaining, as it provides a
visual cue that the short form *is* a short form, and thus not
pronounced exactly as spelled.
   And I seem to have the idea that for shortened forms using all
upper-case, you use full-stops for those you pronounce letter by
letter (initialisms: U.S., B.B.C., etc.), but you don't for those you
pronounce as a single word (acronyms: AIDS, OPEC, etc.). Because of
this, I even write "C.D.-ROM".
   Is there any basis to this idea? (Just curious. I guess I was
taught it back in the 1960s, because I didn't just make up the idea to
be different.)
> That last pattern reflects the one that holds for proper names
> absolute, and "proper names" that contain a generic element. Compare:
> The United States did thus and so, America has never been invaded.
> England was bombed, the UK sent an expeditionary force.
   Seemingly inexplicable exceptions to this, though, are countries
that (sometimes) take "the" in front: such as the Ukraine, the
Argentine, the Gambia, the Sudan, the Congo, the Netherlands, the
Lebanon - and maybe a few others I've heard but cannot recall now. I
suppose there are historical reasons for these, since they otherwise
make no sense. I get the feeling they are almost obsolete now,
although I still do occasionally hear people say them, even people who
are otherwise quite modern in their usages generally.
   With the examples I gave, the "the" is used only sometimes; but
I have an idea that there's one country that is still almost always
prefixed with "the", although I don't recall which one it is.

             Regards,
             Michael Edwards.