English uses stump compounds formed by taking (roughly) the first syllable of two (or three) words and adjoining them. This is the presumably the process behind real-estate neologisms like Soho (< South of Houston) and Noho (< North of Houston), truncated brand names like HoJo (< Howard Johnson, a hotel chain), and nicknames for celebrities like BoJo (< Beau Johnson) and FloJo (< Florence Griffith Joyner). One strange property of these compounds—documented in an unpublished paper I presented with Laurel MacKenzie at an LSA meeting many years ago—is that when such compounds contain an orthographic <o>, it is almost always pronounced with the GOAT vowel (e.g., American English [oʊ]) even when that is unfaithful to the underlying pronunciation. Thus Soho is [ˈsoʊ.hoʊ], not the more faithful [ˈsaʊ.haʊ]. And, the second syllable of Samohi, a stump compound for Santa Monica High School, is presumably read […moʊ…] even though it stands in for [ˈmɑ.nɪ.kə].
(h/t: Laurel, of course.)
