And we’re back.
Yesterday, I wrote a few things about Broadway and mentioned that they’d taken the letter “I” right out of their seating alphabet.
Oh, the alphabet. The English Alphabet.
We know it well. Most of us learned the alphabet by the time we hit kindergarten. But we probably had an early jump, as it mostly happens in stages. Around age 2, some kids recognize certain letters and can sing or say the “ABC” song aloud. But by age three, they recognize about half the letters. They also start to connect letters to their sounds. From there the progress continues.
So yes. We’ve known these letters for quite some time. There are 26 in all. But those letters have been around a long time too. The early alphabetic writing started about four thousand years ago. According to many scholars, it was in Egypt that it all began, sometime between 1800 and 1900 BC. Give or take a few camels.
This is a bit boring, but important. The English word “alphabet” comes to us from the Latin language. From the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta. And, these Greek words are derivations of the Phoenician aleph and bet, which go all the way back to those early Egyptian times.
But today, the alphabet works very hard for us. Those 26 letters take part in forming all our words. And we have a lot of those too. How many words are in the English Language? According to Webster: “There is no exact count of the number of words in English, and one reason is certainly because languages are ever expanding; in addition, their boundaries are always flexible.” AND. “It has been estimated that the vocabulary of English includes roughly one million words (although most linguists would take that estimate with a chunk of salt, and some have said they wouldn’t be surprised if it is off the mark by a quarter-million); that tally includes the myriad names of chemicals and other scientific entities. Many of these are so peripheral to common English use that they do not or are not likely to appear even in an unabridged dictionary.”
I asked Bard the same question. He said, “The English language has an estimated one million words, but the number of words in common use is around 171,476.”
So. Speaking of common. The most commonly used letter from the English alphabet is E. The least is Z. And, the most common word in English is “the.”
I should add here, English is the official language of 53 countries and is spoken by over 1.5 billion people worldwide. Mandarin Chinese is the most common language in the world in terms of native speakers. About 1.118 billion people speak it as their first language. However, if we consider all speakers, including those who speak it as a second language, English is the most common language in the world, with those 1.5 billion speakers mentioned above.
But our letters are versatile. By this, I mean that the 26 letters of our alphabet make up more than 40 distinct sounds. Many letters have different sounds, e.g. the C in cat sounds different than the C in city.
Last but not least, the “pangram” is worth mentioning. I’ve never tried to write one on my own. But it is a sentence which contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet. I’d say the most famous pangram is: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” We had to tap that one out in typing class back in high school. Again and again. But there are even shorter ones around, like: “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.”
“How vexingly quick daft zebras jump!”
Woot.
Oh, and finally. “I am.” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
And with that, I am out of here.
“””””””””””””
“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein
“””””””””””””
“Silence is the language of god. All else is poor translation.”
― Rumi
“””””””””””””
“It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
“””””””””””””
Write me a letter. Lots of letters.
