Re: Idioms & Phrases

On 26 August, Arthaey Angosii wrote:


> The language has a tendency to shorten many common phrases into a single
> word, although everyone knows the expanded form to which it refers. Anyone
> know of another language (con or nat) that does this sort of thing?
    Hebrew does it. For example:

|natbag| (= Ben Gurion Airport, outside of  Tel Aviv)
            is short for |nativ te'ufa Ben Gurion|

|motsash| (= Saturday night)
            is short for |motsae shabat|

|sakash| (= sleeping bag)
            is short for |sak shena|

    A very interesting shortening, IMHO, is what
Israelis do to |le-hit-raot| , the equivalent of
"see you later". (Grammatically, it breaks down into
le (= towards) hit (reflexive) raot (form of the verb
"to see"). Israelis often shorten it to |lehit|.
The context, of course, makes it perfectly clear
what is meant, but strictly speaking, it is a strange
thing to say: "towards-reflexive". It just begs for
the question:  reflexive _what_?
(I can think of a few verbs!   ;-)    )

    The thing is, AFAIK, that the more people use
the shortened forms, the more they turn into words in
their own right and the phases they're based on
become obscure. The (American) English word
"snafu" comes to mind.
    This is even more evident across langs, when
the shortened form, based on a phrase in one lang,
gets used in another lang, but the original phrase is
left behind. For example, any educated
Israeli knows what |nato| (N.A.T.O.) and |nasa|
(N.A.S.A.) are, their doings being reported in the
media all the time. But just how many of those Israelis
know the original phrases the acronyms are based on?
Very few, I suspect.

    ObConlang: I haven't gotten to the "shorten and slang"
stage of development yet with rtemmu, my conlang.


Dan Sulani
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likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a

A word is an awesome thing.