[can.general] How did we wind up with "CDN" as an abbreviation for "Canada"?

sahayman@watmath.UUCP (Steve Hayman) (10/28/86)

I've never understood how you get CDN, the official ISO 3-character
abbreviation for CANADA.  I suppose you could get it from CanaDiaN but
that's a pretty odd way to do it.  Wouldn't CAN make more sense?
Or even CND?  Was I sick the day we voted on CDN?

Steve Hayman
Math Faculty Computing Facility
U. of Waterloo

taras@utcs.UUCP (10/28/86)

And what is wrong with having CDN as an abbreviation for Canadian.  If you
pronounce the three letter combination very quickly it sort of sounds like
Canadian, and besides it has been used as a abbreviation for Canadian for
as long as I can remember, which is at least 20 years.

Telex was/is great for this kind of stuff, can you figure out who CDN NTL
is?
-- 

			 	Taras Pryjma 
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				bitnet: tpryjma@utoronto
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lamy@utai.UUCP (10/29/86)

Is Canada the only country whose abbreviation designates the inhabitants 
instead of the country?

Jean-Francois Lamy
AI Group, Dept of Computer Science     CSNet: lamy@ai.toronto.edu
University of Toronto		       EAN:   lamy@ai.toronto.cdn
Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 1A4	       UUCP:  lamy@utai.uucp

taras@utcs.UUCP (11/04/86)

In article <2602@utai.UUCP> lamy@utai.UUCP writes:
# Is Canada the only country whose abbreviation designates the inhabitants 
# instead of the country?
# 
# Jean-Francois Lamy

There are two things that I could say, 1. is that maybe Canadians figure
that people are more important than real estate and 2. you might think of
the word Canadian as denoting something that belongs to Canada. 

Is there anything wrong with an abbreviation that designates the
inhabitants instead of the coutry???

-- 

			 	Taras Pryjma 
				uucp: taras@utcs.uucp
				bitnet: tpryjma@utoronto
				Bell: +1 (416) 536-2821

DO NOT WASH:  This vehicle part of scientific dirt experiment!