Did You Know: Language?

 by Nathaniel Gingell

There are currently somewhere between 200 - 400 different alphabets in the world. The alphabet with the most letters is the Khmer (Cambodia) alphabet with 74 letters, and the alphabet with the least is Rotokas, spoken by just a few thousand people in New Guinea, with 12 letters.

While the very first alphabet can be traced back to Semitic-speaking people in Egypt in the 2nd millennium BCE, the Modern English alphabet developed around the 7th century from Latin Script into the written Old English.

The longest word in the world consists of 195 Sanskrit characters (too long to include here!), and the longest word in English consists of 189,819 letters, is the chemical name for the protein connectin, and takes 3 hours to say. The shortest word in the English language is 'a'.

For an English-speaker the most difficult language to learn in the world is widely-thought to be Mandarin-Chinese, with its complex writing system and thousands of special characters that are so different to a Latin-based alphabet. Japanese is also very tricky to learn due to it's 3 separate writing systems, politeness hierarchy and opposite sentence structure to English.

English can also be difficult to learn - with words such as bumfuzzle, cattywampus and floccinaucinihilipilification it's no surprise!