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If you’re reading, the capitals are different, so that’s 52 letters. In the real world you may encounter cursive, so that’s 52 more letters. So to read English
by geraldwhen 3y ago
If you’re reading, the capitals are different, so that’s 52 letters. In the real world you may encounter cursive, so that’s 52 more letters.
So to read English, you’re looking at 104 distinct characters, and that’s before you discuss diphthongs and digraphs.
- stephendause 3y agoeh, I don't know. Cursive is pretty rare nowadays. You also in my opinion do not really need the capital letters, and many of them look like their lowercase counterparts, but I take your point. I definitely think English can be tricky to learn, though, and feel lucky to speak it natively given that it is the lingua franca in many (perhaps most) contexts.
- istjohn 3y agoHow many fonts are there? A couple hundred? Plus bold and italics.
- thih9 3y agoThere is some common base though. E.g.: If you’ve seen the letter “o” in one variant, you’ve seen it in other variants too.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI don't think letters being in cursive is semantically important. Letter case is, somewhat. I think Cyrillic doesn't even have letter-case, which I've often found interesting.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoBut it does. Most of the lower case letters are simply very similar to the larger upper case ones. Upper case, or majuscule, is used as the initial letter of a sentence and for proper nouns just as in English. At least that's what Wikipedia says. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets, https://learnrussianstepbystep.com/en/capitalization-in-russian/ https://learnrussianstepbystep.com/en/capitalization-in-russ..., etc.