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“).
27 Comments
rikudou@lemmings.world · 9 pts · 285d
The umlauted letters are separate letters, your table is wrong.
Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 285d
Anyone care to explain why it's getting downvoted?
lemmie689@lemmy.sdf.org · 20 pts · 285d
Maybe its not really a shower thought, its a list. Idk just a guess.
Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 285d
My best guess as well
Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl · 7 pts · 285d
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.
regdog@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 285d
There should be a name for bad "shower thoughts" posts.
Shower slop?
Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 pts · 285d
Admetus@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 285d
Kanji and Hanzi belong to logograms and are not 100% phonetically indicative.
Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 285d
And French doesn't have é è ë û ê ç ô and ï?
belluck@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 8 pts · 285d
Also ä ö ü for German. And Chinese is missing completely. I highly suspect this was written by an LLM.
rikudou@lemmings.world · 1 pts · 285d
I don't think a LLM would be so wrong about it.
lime@feddit.nu · 5 pts · 285d
they're really bad with numbers
markz@suppo.fi · 1 pts · 285d
How many r's in an alphabet?
lime@feddit.nu · 1 pts · 285d
one i think
rikudou@lemmings.world · 1 pts · 285d
Does Å™ count?
markz@suppo.fi · 1 pts · 285d
Dunno, is it considered a separate letter?
rikudou@lemmings.world · 1 pts · 285d
Depends. Not according to OP, yes according to everyone else.
Takapapatapaka@tarte.nuage-libre.fr · 2 pts · 285d
Tbf i've never heard of them being counted in the alphabet as separated letters, so 26 is the number i've always seen.
Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 285d
Then why count them for Germany?
markz@suppo.fi · 2 pts · 285d
In some languages they count as diacritics, while in others they are separate letters.
For example, in Finnish, å, ä, and ö are independent letters. The dots don't do anything special, just like in i.
Takapapatapaka@tarte.nuage-libre.fr · 1 pts · 284d
Apparently OP made a separate note for German special letters but did not include them in the count in the list, it's also 26. They could have made the specification for French too indeed, or not have made the one for German.
nocturne@slrpnk.net · 4 pts · 285d
🇫🇮suomi: 29
Demonmariner@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 285d
Toki Pona has 14 letters (and less than 200 words).
lemmie689@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 pts · 285d
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.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 285d
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, and still understand it that way. Read and Listen is easy, Write would be the challenging part.
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.
lemmie689@lemmy.sdf.org · 1 pts · 282d
Interesting story. Thanks!
oakward@feddit.org · 1 pts · 285d
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.
rikudou@lemmings.world · 3 pts · 285d
Those count as separate letters.