> Like Japan’s kanji alphabet, the oldest writing system in the world is syllabic.
I think they have that mixed up with hiragana and katakana. Kanji are Chinese characters.
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I think they have that mixed up with hiragana and katakana. Kanji are Chinese characters.
But Chinese characters are.
21 letters.
It's post-3rd-century and includes the G; you might have remembered an accurate statistic ("20 or 21 letters") while forgetting to count your alphabet, which only contains 19 or 20.
K is barely used, but you wouldn't be able to argue that it wasn't used at all. It's used in "kal.", which you have to use when you're specifying a date.
off-by-one errors are to be expected...
K is such a fringe case. I checked back and you're right, it was consistently used for that specific case 'kal.' and for some names. Interestingly though I don't think any (major) romance language retained that spelling afterwards. It's a bit like the British 'ö' in 'Coöperative'. Given that I remember one single time I saw that spelling in the wild while visiting the UK, should I now go and write angry letters to all editors that "English really has 27 letters!!"? How rare is a letter allowed to be used before we declare it "not part of the alphabet"?
Well, no. The 'ö' in 'coöperative' is not a single grapheme; it's two graphemes. The same mark, which we might call U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS, is used with the same significance on any arbitrary letter (OK, any vowel), indicating that the letter is not part of a digraph and should be interpreted alone. This is how the distinction is drawn in writing between a coöp [where hippies work; each 'o' is a separate vowel] and a coop [where chickens live; the 'oo' is a single vowel].
The example I generally use to illustrate the conceptual difference is that, in Mandarin pinyin, é and è represent identical vowels, whereas in French é and è represent two different vowels. There's just one letter "e" in the pinyin example (along with two tone markings), but there are two letters in the French example.
(The French themselves would disagree - they don't include letters like è in their official alphabet - but they are wrong.)
There are characters (U+308 in this codepage), letters ("E" and "e"), accent marks (which require an accompanying letter), and graphemes ("e", but also "ee").
Instead of iteratively correcting each other by refining and redefining words in each response, how about we communicate in good faith on the actual topic: cuneiform.