AIDS/sida in Romance & Other Languages

[ugly_boy]

While perousing Radio-Canada, I noticed this headline:

Bill Clinton et Bill Gates appellent la communauté internationale à faire de la lutte contre le sida une priorité

I recognize « sida » from Spanish as the word for AIDS, but it surprised me that the name was not in all caps, like it is in English, and like other acronyms are in French, i.e.

Comments

[dontbeakakke]

AIDS in Basque is HEIS which stands for Hartutako Inmuno Eskasiaren Sidromea.

And 東京大学 (Tōkyō Daigaku) is abbreviated to 東大 (Tōdai) in Japanese, so it apparently works much like in Chinese... for that example, anyway.

[dontbeakakke]

and I don't really know if HEIS is pronounced as a word, but SIDA is also listed in the dictionary.

[dontbeakakke]

I are can spel real good.

HIES*

[spyderqueen]

Heck, Japan does that for SO MANY types of words :)

[keigan]

The acronym SIDA has been lexicalized as a common noun; that's why you see it written in lower case. I think it's fairly international too.

Japanese

[tenou_k]

And, because nothing is ever easy, you could always (just for variety) use 後天性免疫不全症候群 (koutenseimenekifuzenshoukougun) to refer to that tricky aquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Re: Japanese

[loudasthesun]

dammit, beat me to it!

[anonymous]

in Hindi it's एड्स which is not an acronym, but just the same as the English word.

In answer to your edit:

[sparkofcreation]

An acronym is (by definition) read as a word: AIDS, laser, radar, NASA, NATO. Something that is read as initials is not an acronym but an initialism: FBI, BBC, UN.

In Spanish, those are called acrónimo and siglas respectively.