>>This phenomenon is actually quite common in Japanese. It consists in
>>simplifying long phrases (creating abbreviations thus) by taking the
first
>>two morae of each word. With native words and words borrowed from
Chinese,
>>it usually corresponds to the first kanji of each word, so the result is
>>quite similar to our making of abbreviations by keeping only the first
>>letter of each word, except that in the case of Japanese it stays
>>pronounceable without having to just spell it.
I'd say it is similar to English quite common practice
(especially in slang and colloquial speech) of reducing
words to their first syllable, as in "constructed
language" -> "conlang".
Cheers,
Javier