Is there a linguistics term for when an acronym is the same in more than one language?
For example, "RIP" (Requiescat in pace.) in Latin is the same acronym as "RIP" ("Rest in peace.") in English.
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Sign up to join this communityIs there a linguistics term for when an acronym is the same in more than one language?
For example, "RIP" (Requiescat in pace.) in Latin is the same acronym as "RIP" ("Rest in peace.") in English.
As far as I know, there's no standard term for this. But depending how they came about, these matches might be cases of:
Expressive loans (aka phono-semantic matching) are particularly fun, and many examples can be found online. My favorite is the English "club" loaned into Japanese as 倶楽部 kurabu: the individual characters mean "together", "fun", and "place".
I'd say RIP counts as an example of this, since it originated with the Latin requiescat in pace. While "in" and "peace" are cognates of the respective Latin words, "rest" is not: it coincidentally started with the same letter, and was chosen in the English version to keep the acronym the same (instead of, say, "sleep", which is an equally valid translation of the Latin).