On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 08:22:51 -0500, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

[nb]

>> What, specifically, means nothing? Surely not "i18n"?
>
> Yes, "i18n." I've never seen that collocation outside this List.

It's not at all rare on Web pages that deal with the topic. Google gives
about 5,830,000 "hits" for [i18n], so it's not exactly obscure. (I didn't
expect that many, but, "i18n" is a useful four-keystroke form.) One might
take a different point of view after typing a document that uses the
traditional form frequently, and without auto-completion in the software.
Query: What's an equally-brief, or almost-equally-brief abbreviation for
the word? "Int'n"? Is such an abbreviation unambiguous? Does teh frequent
use of an abbreviation detract from the formality of a document? ("I18n"
is a new way of abbreviating, with less risk of ambiguity than traditional
ways.)

Thanks to my parents and teachers, I still retain a good amount of the
curiosity I was born with; when I bump into something as distinctive as
"i18n", my first reaction is to do a Google search, if online. My problem
is poor ability to manage my curiosity.

===

Linguistic note:

The art of abbreviating seems to be declining. I have some doubts that
it's taught properly, if at all, to many, these days and in the recent
past.
There's something I call "literary sense", a kind of awareness, that
revolts against considering the two-letter state, province, and territory
postal codes to be abbreviations. Many are not literary; their
two-consecutive-caps. format is not literary. It seems that only a
minority of copy editors at periodicals still use true state abbreviations.

While this might seem contradictory to my support of "i18n" (my first
reaction was, "What the heck is *that*?), I don't mind embedded whimsy and
inventiveness, especially if the result is concise and unambiguous.

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath