this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
34 points (100.0% liked)
languagelearning
14395 readers
23 users here now
Building Solidarity - One Word at a Time
Rules:
- No horny posting
- No pooh posting
- Don't be an ass
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If anyone's wondering why, it's called ateji: writing foreign loanwords with kanji that have similar sounds but not necessarily much correspondence in meaning. Nowadays people just write things using katakana (a phonetic script where each character represents a single syllable), but ateji used to be the standard. That said, it's still very common to see single-character abbreviations for countries which use the first character of their ateji names (e.g. 独 for Germany, 豪 for Australia, and the aforementioned 仏 for France) in headlines as well as compounds like {日豪|にちごう}{関係|かんけい} (Japan-Australian relations) or, apparently, {仏式|ふつしき}バルブ.