Re: Japanese (was an ol Conlang Post: "Borrowing Words")

In a message dated 2003:09:27 03:19:59 PM, christophe.grandsire@FREE.FR
writes:

>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. The funny part is that
>Japanese people have no problem applying it to words borrowed from English
>or other languages ;))) (and don't mind making slight deformations for
>niceness, as in the "gundam" case).
And some of the Japanese terms are rather nicer than their English
originals; for instance, "wapuro" flows much more trippingly off the
tongue than the ungainly compound "word processor", which always calls
to my mind the image of letters being dumped into a whirling food
processor to be pureed into unintelligibility . . .

-Mark

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