(keitai-l) Re: shortened phrases and words

There's also all kinds of crazy shorthand, especially left over from back in the
day (6 years ago) when everyone only had alphanumeric pagers.

39 = thank you -- "san" "kyu", etc.
59 =go? -- "i" "ku"

These are possible b/c numbers in Japanese have multiple pronunciations. For
example 9 is "ku", "kyu", "nain", or "kokonotsu"

Last week I saw and ad on a subway for a website about advertising on trains.
Advertising in Japanese is "kokoku", so part of the domain name was 559.com = "ko
ko ku"

r e n


Gerhard Fasol wrote:

> George Ritter wrote:
> >
> > Intensely interesting.  Does anyone have a list of these shortened Japanese
> > phrases and words?
>
> Japanese language is full of those shortened phrases and words. That's
> not specific to keitai at all. Often it's the "most significant" kanji of
> a long name: as an example - 東京大学　becomes 東大, or
> the railway company: 東京急行 becomes 東急, or the railway line
> from Tokyo to Yokohama 東京横浜線　becomes 東横線, or the motorway
> from Yokohama to Yokosuka becomes: YokoYokosen (横横線).
> By the way this custom (such as many similar customs) are not specific
> to Japan and Japanese language but are also found in China. For example:
> Beijing University: 北京大学　becomes　北大.
>
> Good luck George with learning Kanji!
> The bad news is that there are up to 60,000 total -
> the good news is you only need about 2000-3000 of them in Japan for
> daily life, and a good computer contains about 10,000.
>
> Gerhard Fasol
> http://www.eurotechnology.com/
> fasol@eurotechnology.com

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morgan stanley dean witter japan
e-business technologies | engineering and strategy



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