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From: The Last Doctor <mike@xenocyte.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.drwho
Subject: Re: Doctor Who Spotting
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2024 12:31:05 -0000 (UTC)
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Daniel70 <daniel47@nomail.afraid.org> wrote:
> Your Name wrote on 14/6/24 8:29 am:
>> On 2024-06-13 10:21:15 +0000, Blueshirt said:
>>> Daniel70 wrote:
>>>> Blueshirt wrote on 12/6/24 10:59 pm:
>>>>> 
>>>>> You wait til we start talking about the Irish language, we
>>>>> don't even have 26 letters in our alphabet!
>>>> 
>>>> More or Less??
>>> 
>>> Less. There's only 18 letters in the Irish alphabet.
>> 
>> The Rotokas language of New Guinea only has 12 letters in the alphabet 
>> (and two of those letters sound the same!).  :-p
>> 
>> The Khmer language of Southeast Asia has 74 letters in the alphabet, 
>> including 24 dependent vowels and 12 independent vowels.
>> 
>> The Chinese language has over 50,000 symbols (many are only historic 
>> usage), but only 24 basic characters. Japanese, originally based on 
>> Chinese, has similar numbers.  :-)
> 
> In my viewing of Archeological-type Ducos, I've other wondered how many 
> Hieroglyph the Ancient Egyptians used.

Over 700, but they were of differing types - logograms, which were literal
images of objects - eg “eye” meant “eye”; phonograms, which were an
expanded alphabet - 24 single-consonant hieroglyphs, plus some two- and
three- consonant symbols (with implicit vowels) ; determinatives, symbols
that clarified the meaning of the preceding hieroglyph; and strokes used
for numbers etc. 

With variations there were actually thousands of symbols but most people
wouldn’t have known what most of them meant. The phonograms evolved into
the middle-Egyptian Demotic script as the other hieroglyph types faded away
as scholars needed to understand each others work, and then later into
Coptic.

-- 
“Most of the Universe is knackered, babes.”  - The Doctor