(Warning: this post uses UTF-8.)

Nicholas Bodley <nbodley at speakeasy dot net> wrote:

> This name seems especially concise in Cyrillic (five letters?), and
> very long in German; not sure the latter is correct, but I have
> "Tschetschenien". It might be fun to try to find other pairs of
> extreme length and conciseness.

Wikipedia lists Чечня as the Russian spelling. I'm going to go out on a
limb and assume they got this one right. The Chechen word for
"Chechnya" isn't anything like "Chechnya."

German is famous for its expansion of the "ch" sound into four letters,
while many Slavic languages spell it as a single letter, whether written
in Latin or Cyrillic.

> This suggest another topic: Which writing system (other than IPA!)
> offers the best set of glyphs to efficiently represent most of the
> world's significant languages? I realize one needs to define "best"
> and other terms. Possible candidate: Cyrillic. (Armenian, by any
> chance?)

Possibly the most on-topic post ever on Qalam.

Among alphabets, Cyrillic would seem to have an advantage due to its
repertoire of over 30 "basic" (unaccented) letters. But both Cyrillic
and Latin orthographies have been augmented with a variety of
diacritical marks, which increases their "efficiency" in this regard.

To add flavor to Nicholas's question (BTW, note my personal vote on the
apostrophe-S question), consider non-alphabets as well as alphabets, and
change the term "efficiently" to "efficiently and accurately."

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/