What is the largest alphabet in the world? Even Spanish has more letters than our

We are far from having the smallest alphabet in the world – the shortest has 11 letters – but it was even more unthinkable to have 74 kaons to decorate. But not for the speakers of a curious Southeast Asian dialect.

With our 26 letters, it takes a while until the Portuguese alphabet is decorated. We could simplify it, as the 4,320 speakers do the language Rotocas, who live on the island of Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea.

This alphabet has only 12 letters and 11 sounds and is the smallest in the world. The spelling is understandable to a Portuguese: vowels, for example, are, like ours, a, and, i, o, u, but also aa, ee, ii, oo and uu.

Or we could simplify the style of Latin, like the Italians, who only use 21 letters, Ending the English (the letters K, W, X, Ey do not exist), and with the letter J (yes, the first letter of the most common name of Portuguese men does not exist in Italy).

But be aware that The Spaniards beat us in number of letters: they have 27and it is the fault of ñ. As it remembers in the linguist Marco Franco Neves, ñ is quite different from our ç, which is not a letter because it is just a “variation of C”. Ñ ​​is a separate letter, ordered in the alphabet after n.

Interestingly, says the linguist, the Spanish alphabet until 2010 had 29 letters, since the two L, the “LL” (which in Spanish reads “LH”) and “CH”, were considered letters. Today, they are considered digraphs, that is, two letters that together form one phoneme (such as our “CH” or “LH”).

But in Europe there is a champion of letters, and there are only 5 million people who have it as their mother tongue. We talk about Slovak alphabet, with 46 letters: A, Á, Á, Ä, Ä, Ä, Ä, Ä, Ä, Ä, Ä, Č, D, Č, D, DŽ, DŽ, DS, E, F, L, L, L, ö, Í, Í, Í, Í, Í, Í, L Ĺ, Ľ, Ľ, Ľ, ë, É, Â, je, R, R, R, R, R, R, R, R, R, ō, ō, ō, L, L, L, L, L, Ly, L, . Ý, Z, Ž.

74 Letters and a lot of history

The longest alphabet in the world is Khmer, the basis of the certified dialectal language of the Cambodia. It has 74 letters, with 33 consonants, 24 dependent vowels (cannot be written alone), 12 independent vowels and various diacritical symbols.

It is a language full of history, since it is one of the oldest in Southeast Asia, dominated in the continental part by the Khmer Empire until the fifteenth century. This language has influences from Sanskrit and Pāli languages, and their oldest scriptures date back to 611 d.C..

This alphabet complex has Four writing styles: One that uses that uses oblique letters, another referring to vertical letters, others with faster types with clearer serifs and the calligraphic version of the alphabet.

Khmer’s curiosity: to describe the quantity, No numbers are used -The words are repeated. For example, if we want to write “two old pigs”, we wrote “raw: k” (pig) and twice “cah” (old): raw: k cah cah.

The alphabet “bigger than life”

Although the Guinness is Khmer, all alphabets are “boys” when we talk about Chinese. This one does not have a defined and ordered alphabet, and thankfully: to write it, we would spend countless pages.

It seems almost infinite, and it is often said that the Chinese alphabet is “bigger than life”-has More than 100 thousand kaonsbut a “normal” Chinese only knows a few thousand.

Also note that Mandarin and Chinese are not the same – the first is one of the Chinese dialects, spoken by more than half of the population and selected as the official language of China and Taiwan.

It explains that in 2013, the Chinese government published a list of the 3500 most essential characters used in the modern Chinese language.

But if you are curious about learning Chinese (or mandarin, as it is most common in the West), that this article does not inhibit it: to read a newspaper, for example, you will need to recognize “only” about 1000 letters. Good job.