At first glance, this might appear to be a bit 'Americo-centric', but a bit of historico-linguistic research is revelatory. The various flavours of English treat acronyms and abbreviations in different manners, and for an international project such as MuseScore, I don't see any imperative to comply with American usage.
That said, there is a logic to the treatment of abbreviations and acronyms in non-US usage. For instance, in standard British English, the abbreviation for 'mister' is Mr (NOT followed by a period, because the 'r' is the last letter of the abbreviated word, so there is no reason to doubly indicate the end of the word with a period). Even in US English, the abbreviation for 'United States' is treated in two different ways, depending on whether it is a noun or an adjective. 'US English' is correct usage (according to both the Chicago Manual of Style and the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage), whereas the proper form for 'in the U.S., English usage differs...' includes the periods.
According to Jojo's informative (and highly amusing) post, the term G.I.T. should be considered an acronym, with each letter standing for a specific word. That being the case, the question is twofold: First, whether or not to include the periods between the letters; and second, whether the first letter should be capitalised and the rest lower-case (Git), or the whole thing capitalised (GIT).
The New York Times’ practice is to print acronyms of proper names entirely in capitals if they have four letters or fewer: NATO, NASA, PIN, SALT. With longer acronyms, only the first letter is capitalized: Unesco, Nascar, Unicef, Nasdaq, and so on.
There is general precedent for this logic; in many style books numbers of less than ten are spelled out while numbers from 11 and up are rendered in numeric digits.
On the other hand:
The Chicago Manual of Style, which is widely used in book publishing, generally prefers the all-capital form unless the term is listed otherwise in standard dictionaries.
This, it must be said, is something of a cop-out; the CMS claims to set style while deferring to 'standard dictionaries.' Ahem.
As an old-school type, I generally defer to Fowler (A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1965). The entry 'acronym' is cross-referenced to the entry 'curtailed words', and some of the applicable parts of that article read as follows:
'Some of these [curtailed words] establish themselves so fully as to take the place of their originals or to make them seem pendantic; others remain slangy or adapted only to particular audiences. A few specimens of various dates and status have here been collected as possibly useful to those who have, or wish to have, views on the legitimacy of curtailment....
'Another way of forming curtailed words is to combine initial letters, a method now so popular, especially in America, that a word--acronym--has been coined for it. The first world war produced a few--Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), Dora (Defence of the Ream Act), Wrens (Women's Royal Navy Service), and the second a great many; among them Asdic (Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee)..., Naafi (Navy Army and Air Force Institutes), Radar (Radio Detection and Ranging)....
The interesting thing here is that Fowler presents all these acronyms as proper nouns in the Dictionary; that is to say, with an initial capital followed by lower-case letters and no intervening periods. That is in line with your proposal, surprising though that might seem to those of us who speak and write an English not dependent upon 'American' usage....
If there are doubts how to spell Git, there are 2 possible sources; Linus Torvalds (the creator) and Junio Hamano (the current maintainer). And maybe a 3rd, the documentation at https://git-scm.com, that clearly calsss it "Git" all over the place.
The language used inside MuseScore is US English, there is a Britisch English translation available. (measure vs. bar, color vs. colour, etc.)
There's also an US English translation, but ist purpose is to fix typos after release and to introduce UTF chars where in source code we can't.
"GIT" is not in the translatable strings, it is not even a string inside MuseScore, so exists only on the Website, and even there not as a translatable string
Comments
At first glance, this might appear to be a bit 'Americo-centric', but a bit of historico-linguistic research is revelatory. The various flavours of English treat acronyms and abbreviations in different manners, and for an international project such as MuseScore, I don't see any imperative to comply with American usage.
That said, there is a logic to the treatment of abbreviations and acronyms in non-US usage. For instance, in standard British English, the abbreviation for 'mister' is Mr (NOT followed by a period, because the 'r' is the last letter of the abbreviated word, so there is no reason to doubly indicate the end of the word with a period). Even in US English, the abbreviation for 'United States' is treated in two different ways, depending on whether it is a noun or an adjective. 'US English' is correct usage (according to both the Chicago Manual of Style and the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage), whereas the proper form for 'in the U.S., English usage differs...' includes the periods.
According to Jojo's informative (and highly amusing) post, the term G.I.T. should be considered an acronym, with each letter standing for a specific word. That being the case, the question is twofold: First, whether or not to include the periods between the letters; and second, whether the first letter should be capitalised and the rest lower-case (Git), or the whole thing capitalised (GIT).
The New York Times’ practice is to print acronyms of proper names entirely in capitals if they have four letters or fewer: NATO, NASA, PIN, SALT. With longer acronyms, only the first letter is capitalized: Unesco, Nascar, Unicef, Nasdaq, and so on.
There is general precedent for this logic; in many style books numbers of less than ten are spelled out while numbers from 11 and up are rendered in numeric digits.
On the other hand:
The Chicago Manual of Style, which is widely used in book publishing, generally prefers the all-capital form unless the term is listed otherwise in standard dictionaries.
This, it must be said, is something of a cop-out; the CMS claims to set style while deferring to 'standard dictionaries.' Ahem.
(citations from http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/03/aipac.html)
As an old-school type, I generally defer to Fowler (A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1965). The entry 'acronym' is cross-referenced to the entry 'curtailed words', and some of the applicable parts of that article read as follows:
'Some of these [curtailed words] establish themselves so fully as to take the place of their originals or to make them seem pendantic; others remain slangy or adapted only to particular audiences. A few specimens of various dates and status have here been collected as possibly useful to those who have, or wish to have, views on the legitimacy of curtailment....
'Another way of forming curtailed words is to combine initial letters, a method now so popular, especially in America, that a word--acronym--has been coined for it. The first world war produced a few--Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), Dora (Defence of the Ream Act), Wrens (Women's Royal Navy Service), and the second a great many; among them Asdic (Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee)..., Naafi (Navy Army and Air Force Institutes), Radar (Radio Detection and Ranging)....
The interesting thing here is that Fowler presents all these acronyms as proper nouns in the Dictionary; that is to say, with an initial capital followed by lower-case letters and no intervening periods. That is in line with your proposal, surprising though that might seem to those of us who speak and write an English not dependent upon 'American' usage....
;o)
If there are doubts how to spell Git, there are 2 possible sources; Linus Torvalds (the creator) and Junio Hamano (the current maintainer). And maybe a 3rd, the documentation at https://git-scm.com, that clearly calsss it "Git" all over the place.
The language used inside MuseScore is US English, there is a Britisch English translation available. (measure vs. bar, color vs. colour, etc.)
There's also an US English translation, but ist purpose is to fix typos after release and to introduce UTF chars where in source code we can't.
"GIT" is not in the translatable strings, it is not even a string inside MuseScore, so exists only on the Website, and even there not as a translatable string
There's no evidence to support it being an acronym for anything.
seems fixed, I don't see that string anymore at all
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.