When you see what I’m writing about this week, my guess is that you’ll say I don’t have enough to do. And you may be right, although mostly, my days are full, and I really think I don’t waste a lot of time.
Some years ago, I devoted a column to apostrophes, the little punctuation marks we use in writing to show contractions and possession. Now I’ll deal with what some might consider useless or spurious letters of the alphabet.
The English language uses 26 letters for its alphabet. The Greeks make do with 24, but the Russians have 33 letters to play with. These languages pale in comparison with the Chinese, who don’t actually have an alphabet. Chinese speakers and writers use between 3,000 and 6,000 characters to communicate properly. The symbols in Chinese represent concepts rather than individual letters.
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