Submitted 9 hours ago by arunshah@piefed.social to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Languages ranked by the size of their alphabets
Tamil: 247
🇰🇭 Khmer: 74
🇳🇵 Nepali: 64
🇮🇳 Hindi: 52
🇯🇵 Japanese: 46
🇵🇰 Urdu: 36
🇦🇲 Armenian: 36
🇷🇺 Russian: 33
🇮🇷 Persian: 32
🇹🇷 Turkish: 29
🇪🇸 Spanish: 27
🇬🇧 English: 26
🇩🇪 German: 26
🇫🇷 French: 26
🇵🇹 Portuguese: 26
🇰🇷 Korean: 24
🇮🇱 Hebrew: 22
🇮🇹 Italian: 21
🇵🇬 Rotokas: 12
Note: The German alphabet consists 26 regular letters, 3 „Umlauts“ (mutated vowels: ä, ö, ü) and 1 ligation (double letter: ß - spoke as a „sharp s“).
The umlauted letters are separate letters, your table is wrong.
Japanese only has 46 letters? So we’re completely ignoring the existence of Kanji?
Kanji and Hanzi belong to logograms and are not 100% phonetically indicative.
Anyone care to explain why it’s getting downvoted?
It probably doesn’t count as a shower thought. Also, the list is probably all wrong, e.g. Khmer and Tamil are abugidas, not alphabets.
Maybe its not really a shower thought, its a list. Idk just a guess.
My best guess as well
🇫🇮suomi: 29
And French doesn’t have é è ë û ê ç ô and ï?
Also ä ö ü for German. And Chinese is missing completely. I highly suspect this was written by an LLM.
I don’t a LLM would be so wrong about it.
Tbf i’ve never heard of them being counted in the alphabet as separated letters, so 26 is the number i’ve always seen.
Portuguese uses 23, w y and k are only for imported words. It also has plenty of mutators like á à ã â é ê ó õ ô ú ç, but I don’t know if you should count those as letters.
Those count as separate letters.
I was watching a docu series on language, I’m sure an estimate of the number of Chinese pictographs in total was around 50000, of which several hundred were common. Literacy in 2000-3000 symbols is enough for most communication.
I went to school in China till 2nd grade and use Cantonese at home (like at a very basic level, I don’t have the lexicon to discuss “adult topics” like politics, science, philosophy, etc…)
But that’s enough to understand 99% of the plot of Mandarin/Cantonese TV shows with zero subtitles. I mean, sometimes there’s new vocab, but your can figure it out with the context. I could also mute the sounds and read chinese subtitles.
I actually don’t know exactly how many characters/syllables I could understand lol. But clearly you don’t need a lot, just grade-school level is good enough.
I don’t think people actually remember characters especially nowadays. Its not like alphabetic languages whete you can sound it out, because the same chracter has like a different pronunciation in each different Chinese Variant (aka: “Dialect”). In the past, I read about that they used to use pen and paper to communicate because of “Dialect” differences.
I remember like the characters for numbers and my Chinese Name, but I can’t write a basic sentence using a pen, even though I can type it using Pinyin or Jyutping (Cantonese Pinyin). Idk if my parents can still write after being in the US for over a decade.
regdog@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
There should be a name for bad “show thougts” posts.
Shower slop?