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Re: Maayan and Shilat
in reply to a message by Swiff
Maayan is pronounced mah-ah-YAHN, with a stop between the two a's. Not enough of a stop to make them different words, but enough to make them different syllables.Shilat (ùéìú) is an acronym for "Shiviti [God's name] lenegdi tamid" which means "I keep God always before me" from Psalm 16, 8.
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Thank you!I would have never guessed that it could be an acronym.
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Are there any acronym names in other languages?Even in Hebrew they're extremely rare. Nili and Shilat are the only ones that come to mind. Do acronym names exist outside of Hebrew?And Swiff, you're welcome. :)
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Some more from the Soviet era:
Vladilen - from Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Gertrud (which is a bona fide name) was passed as an acronym for "hero of labor"
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In another forum, a Polish girl posted some Russian names from Sovient age that were acronyms:Ryevdit - ryevolutsyonnye ditya, "child of the revolution"
Loryeks - acronym of Lenin, October Revolution, Industrialisation, Electrification, Collectivisation, Socialism
Marlena – used for Marx+Lenin
Glasp - short from Glavsprit, the "[State] Spirits Monopoly"
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Would you count as an acronym name a name created from initials of a longer name? If so Jeb would be an example in English, as it goes back to the nickname of the Confederate Civil War general Jeb Stuart, whose official given name was James Ewell Brown Stuart. :)http://www.civilwarhome.com/stuartbi.htm
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Even beyond names, I haven't come across much of true abbreviations. Sure enough, in a religious context in Sanskrit, one comes across interpretations based on the constituent phonemes (or sometimes even less: the holy particle Om has been construed as a + u + M instead of what it possibly originally was: an old particle representing assent), but the contituents are then themselves glossed rather than treated as initial phonemes of glosses, though again there may be some ambiguity sometimes. Loss or retention of affixes and reduplication of initial segment in morphological constructions I am treating as a different phenomenon.How old is the Hebrew use of true (as opposed to reinterpreted) abbreviations in any context? (i.e. what is the oldest, possibly religious text, which uses it). Is the particle ja or ya that stands for God in many hebrew names (e.g. in Abijah) a regular root used in its grammatically proper morphology, or is the beginning of a tend towards circumlocution through abbreviation?An abbreviative system of course makes the rebus principle, and hence alphabetic writing, easier to discover; but Hebrew, at least in the form we know it, may be too late for that explanation to work.
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