Is there a linguistic reason we abbreviate something like the word “Management” as MGMT. What determines which letters will best to use to abbreviate?
In: Biology
I think that’d be a great question for r/etymology, I’d love to read the answers from people who really know this stuff.
I don’t really know this stuff, but I’d guess that it’s mostly removing letters that aren’t pronounced as heavily in the word. Vowels are kind of just the spaces between consonants and they’re usually the first to go – Arabic and Hebrew don’t write vowels down at all. Maybe the consonants that remain are the ones on stressed syllables?
I guess the unhelpful answer is that words are abbreviated to be as short as possible without making it unclear what the word is. That might require different abbreviated lengths for different words, like *mgmt* vs *apt* (apartment) vs *Mr.* (Mister).
Abbreviations like *Pres.* for President clearly work differently
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