I work with an Oracle database like this. In the old days, there was a 30 character limit on column names, so you end up with conventions like no vowels. The limit no longer exists today, but the DBA continues to enforce the limit on new columns.

I never got an answer when I asked. This same government agency also got extremely mad when our dev manager upgraded the ASP.NET version for one project because it had some really useful features we were developing with. They deleted his permissions to deploy to production from there until the end of time, requiring us to email someone each time we wanted to update the application. It was great.