2101: How to Abbreviate in Other Writing Systems

In punctuation, a 'full stop' can indicate the end of a sentence, but also periods are used for abbreviations, so how does abbreviation work in other writing systems? Cyrillic and Greek—both also have letters and distinguish between upper- and lower-cases—basically do the same as English: mostly capital letters sometimes though not necessarily separated with periods. In Arabic this is more complicated because there are 4 forms depending where it is in the word (e.g at the beginning, middle, end, or in isolation) as opposed to 2 cases, and the words are written with the letters connected. Abbreviations are rare in Arabic but the few that exist use periods between letters in the isolated form. In cases like with Japanese where whole pictographs are used will simply reduce characters such as 国際連合 (United Nations), which is made of 国際 (international) and 連合 (union) to make 国連: the first character of each part of the compound. Hebrew will put two marks (“gershayim”) between the penultimate and last letters, such as with שב״כ from שירות הביטחון הכללי (Sherut ha-Bitaẖon haKlali)‎, and it is common that these will be pronounced as their own words (in this case 'shabak') and therefore spelt with the word-final letter forms when relevant.

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