Hallo Christopher,
On Sat, 22 Apr 2000 16:37:07 +0200 GMT (22.04.2000, 22:37 +0800 GMT),
Christopher J. Trybowski wrote:
>> 44 consonants and 12 vowels (plus some tone markers etc) in Thai.
>> 24 letters in Laotian.
>> 26 letters in Arabic.
>> 30 letters in German.
CJT> How interesting ;) And I thought that in Arabic there are much more.
CJT> And in Chinese something about 7000? ;)
The letters in Arabic have up to four different ways of appearance,
depending on whether they are in front, in the middle, at the end of a
word or standing alone. This makes them appear a lot more. But then,
in English, you also have four different ways: upper/lower case, and
handwriting/typing. If you don't believe me, just look at the
lower-case "a". ;-)
In Chinese, you need to know some 2,000 characters to read a
newspaper, highly-learned scholars know some 20,000 to 25,000, but I
learned to my own surprise from a co-worker who's major at university
was Chinese, that there are a total of about 500,000 ! Many of these
are used only in certain regions of China, or are antiquated, but
nevertheless. The number of characters I read is well below 100,
though.
--
Cheers,
Thomas mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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