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

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

>En réponse à J Y S Czhang :
>>     One of my favourite Japanese word "mangalings" is _Gundam_ which
>IIRC comes from "gun dream(s)"..._pokemon_ is from "pocket monster(s)"...
>>     Manga and anime has lotsa these - IMO especially the sci-fi kind...
>
>>     ::looks around for Christophe:: CG probably can tell you peeps more...
>
>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).
>
>Another example from anime is "Digimon" for "digital monster(s)". Another
>example from "normal" Japanese is "sanrenkyuu": "a period of three free
>days" made by taking the first kanji of each of the three following words:
>"mikka" (the first kanji of this word is the kanji for "three": "san"):
>"three days", "renzoku": "succession" and "kyuujitsu": "free day". Another
>example is "nichigin": "National Bank of Japan" from "nihon": "Japan" and
>"ginkou": "bank" (the first kanji, which is pronounced simply "ni" in
"nihon", can also be pronounced "nichi". I suppose it's to make it two
>morae :)) ).
>
>Christophe Grandsire.
>
>http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
>
>You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.
"Chance is the inner rhythm of the world, and the soul of poetry." - Miguel
de Unamuno

    "One thing foreigners, computers, and poets have in common
is that they make unexpected linguistic associations." --- Jasia Reichardt

    "There is no reason for the poet to be limited to words, and in fact the
poet is most poetic when inventing languages. Hence the concept of the poet as
'language designer'."  --- O. B. Hardison, Jr.

"La poésie date d' aujour d'hui."   (Poetry dates from today)
"La poésie est en jeu."             (Poetry is in play)
                --- Blaise Cendrars

--- *DiDJiBuNgA!!* ---

Hanuman "Stitch" Zhang, ManglaLanger (mangle + manga + lang)
http://www.boheme-magazine.net

     Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...

"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
title of a chapter on pidgins and creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_

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