Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lokedhs 1801 days ago
You will definitely see both. You'll see things like Iphone being written by media sources that pride themselves on good writing, such as Dagens Nyheter.

If you go to https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikea the first sentence can be translated to English as: "Ikea Group, written by the company as IKEA Group, is a multi-national furniture company founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad"

Words such as TV started out in upper case because it's an acronym, but once it becomes a normal word, it's written in lower case.
1 comments
cinntaile 1801 days ago
They still write Iphone X, why not Iphone x? or Iphone 10? or Iphone tio? Roman numerals aren't really a part of the Swedish language after all. They write IOS or iOS, why not Ios? Is this not a normal enough word? It's just artificial rules replaced by a different set of artificial rules. Why not just use what everyone else uses, haha.

A bit of a meta discussion in a thread totally unrelated to this, sorry about that.

link
lokedhs 1801 days ago
I think we're drifting away from the original point, which is about not letting corporate marketing departments decide how the written language should work. I used Swedish as an example of a language where this is a more firm rule than English, but Swedish is certainly not alone. It just happens to be the language I know best.

But, I do find the topic of Swedish writing standard to be interesting, so I'll be happy to do my best in responding to your questions, even though I'm not formally a linguist (although I was raised among them)

With regards to your question, I'd write Ios, because it's not an acronym and I do believe that I'm not alone in this. About the version number, I find at least one case of the use of Ios 10 at Svenska Dagbladet: https://www.svd.se/apple-har-atgardat-problem-med-ios-10/om/...

However, it seems to be highly inconsistent, and this is probably caused by these organisations saving money on proof readers.

link
midev 1801 days ago
> which is about not letting corporate marketing departments decide how the written language should work

Why do you keep repeating this? You say you were raised among linguists, but you're getting the most basic tenant of linguistics wrong. There is no such thing as "correct" language.

But more to the point, language allows you to write proper names as though they are registered or defined. It is not incorrect to spell it DigitalOcean, because that's the registered name.

If my name was JoeBob, you don't get to split up my name just because you think English requires it.

link