I’ve got some questions that google is having trouble understanding. 1. Does Shikanai (鹿内) make sense as a given name? 2. How do you make acronyms in Japanese? 3. What is used in place of the Greek alphabet for math equations?
1. It’s a surname, not a given name. 2. You mean like NHK? (If you mean abbreviating with kanji/kana, sometimes just the first character from each word, like 東大 for 東京大学) 3. Greek letters are used here too.
As for 3, greek letters in math are really universal, I can’t think up of any language that uses something else.
Regarding #2, sometimes names are collapsed in Japanese in a similar way that acronyms are used in English. At the top of my head, I can think of political parties or names of countries. Typically, I believe what happens is that, especially with Sino-Japanese words, the first kanji of each “word” ([自立語](#fg “じりつご”)) is taken and used.
For example, the Liberal Democratic Party’s full name is [自由民主党](#fg “じゆうみんしゅとう”). However, just as the English acronym LDP comes from Liberal, Democratic, and Party, they go by [自民党](#fg “じみんとう”) for short.
Companies wanting to shorten [株式会社](#fg “かぶしきがいしゃ”) may choose to use the abbreviation [株](#fg “かぶ”) at the end of their name instead.
Similar phenomena happened historically (and to a certain extent, today) with country names. For instance, instead of calling the English language [英吉利語](#fg “いぎりすご”)), the standard became to take the first kanji 英, assign it the standard on’yomi of エイ, and attached the [語](#fg “ご”) suffix. The U.S. is also called [米国](#fg “べいこく”) (short for [亜米利加](#fg “アメリカ”)[合衆国](#fg “がっしゅうこく”)), but you can see the U.S. referred to in Japanese newspapers as just [米](#fg “べい”).
3 comments
1. It’s a surname, not a given name.
2. You mean like NHK? (If you mean abbreviating with kanji/kana, sometimes just the first character from each word, like 東大 for 東京大学)
3. Greek letters are used here too.
As for 3, greek letters in math are really universal, I can’t think up of any language that uses something else.
Regarding #2, sometimes names are collapsed in Japanese in a similar way that acronyms are used in English. At the top of my head, I can think of political parties or names of countries. Typically, I believe what happens is that, especially with Sino-Japanese words, the first kanji of each “word” ([自立語](#fg “じりつご”)) is taken and used.
For example, the Liberal Democratic Party’s full name is [自由民主党](#fg “じゆうみんしゅとう”). However, just as the English acronym LDP comes from Liberal, Democratic, and Party, they go by [自民党](#fg “じみんとう”) for short.
Companies wanting to shorten [株式会社](#fg “かぶしきがいしゃ”) may choose to use the abbreviation [株](#fg “かぶ”) at the end of their name instead.
Similar phenomena happened historically (and to a certain extent, today) with country names. For instance, instead of calling the English language [英吉利語](#fg “いぎりすご”)), the standard became to take the first kanji 英, assign it the standard on’yomi of エイ, and attached the [語](#fg “ご”) suffix. The U.S. is also called [米国](#fg “べいこく”) (short for [亜米利加](#fg “アメリカ”)[合衆国](#fg “がっしゅうこく”)), but you can see the U.S. referred to in Japanese newspapers as just [米](#fg “べい”).