Naked Science Forum

General Science => General Science => Topic started by: neilep on 06/10/2008 13:12:41

Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: neilep on 06/10/2008 13:12:41
Dearest Letterologits,

As a sheepy I am of course an expert in using my native language..

Out of all the letters that come after 'D' and before 'F'.....'E' is my all time favourite and I have a sneaking suspicion that it's yours too !

Look, here's some geeza writing an 'e' with the end of his finger that he has set alight ! (silly boy)

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Nice eh ?


Is ' E' just as common in other languages that share our alphabet ?...do different laguages consist of a similar number of vowels and consonants ?...do they all have a similar amount of letters ?..which has the most ?..which has the least ?


I don't know.....do ewe know ?


Hugs et les shmisheys



mwah mwah mwah mwah

Neil
Larging It Down The Club On E
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: Evie on 06/10/2008 14:29:49
I actually took a class on cryptography in college and found it very interesting. Studying the frequency of letter occurences is used a lot in code breaking and proves very useful for figuring out the cryptograms one finds in the newspaper! My final project for that class was actually to determine the frequency of letters in the Portuguese language. It was very tedious, I assure you! I printed out some common text in Portuguese and proceeded to count each letter. Took a long time.

Anyway, "a" can sometimes outstrip "e" in romance languages.

There's a nice chart at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequencies
Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: neilep on 06/10/2008 17:39:43
I actually took a class on cryptography in college and found it very interesting. Studying the frequency of letter occurences is used a lot in code breaking and proves very useful for figuring out the cryptograms one finds in the newspaper! My final project for that class was actually to determine the frequency of letters in the Portuguese language. It was very tedious, I assure you! I printed out some common text in Portuguese and proceeded to count each letter. Took a long time.

Anyway, "a" can sometimes outstrip "e" in romance languages.

There's a nice chart at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequencies

Portuguese eh ?......I want to learn Portuguese **

Thank Ewe Evie...that is fascinating and the wiki link is brilliant...It's really nice of ewe to offer to count all the occurrences of certain letters in all Portugese texts that we send ewe  by the way !!..thanks for that !! [;D]

Hang on...could ewe have not just printed it out into Word** or something and ask it to count the letters ?

** a complete and total untruth !
** Other Word Processor programs are also readily available but if Bill wants to send me a few billion dollars I am happy to accept !
Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: Evie on 06/10/2008 18:13:46
As far as I know, Word only does a word count, not individual letters. But, I could have used the Find feature! That would have made the project much less tedious. Why oh why didn't I know you back then, Neily?
Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: lyner on 06/10/2008 23:14:42
EEE lad I'm not sure.
Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: rosalind dna on 06/10/2008 23:18:35
Neil good alphabetic question re; the most common letter in
the English and American English language "E".

But I'm not too sure about the relevance to this letter in say
languages that only use characters for writing like Japanese, Chinese, Korean. (I can't read or write these) or hebrew, arabic etc.

Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: JnA on 07/10/2008 14:03:31
Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a lipogram called Gadsby.... not an 'E' to be found in 50000 words.
Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: Evie on 07/10/2008 15:04:21
Obviously, letter frequency cannot apply to languages in which characters are used for entire words. Luckily, Neil was inquiring about languages that use a Romanized alphabet. The Japanese language, for one, does have a Romanized written representation (often used by students learning to speak the language) called romaji. So in that case, one could determine letter frequency.
Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: Bored chemist on 07/10/2008 19:32:22
The simple answer is no. Can't you count?
"other languages that share our alphabet" contains 6 "a"s and only 4 "e"s

Always glad to help.
:-)
Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: neilep on 07/10/2008 19:35:52
Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a lipogram called Gadsby.... not an 'E' to be found in 50000 words.

Please feel free to recreate the text right here in this thread ! [;)]
Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: neilep on 07/10/2008 19:37:36
Obviously, letter frequency cannot apply to languages in which characters are used for entire words. Luckily, Neil was inquiring about languages that use a Romanized alphabet. The Japanese language, for one, does have a Romanized written representation (often used by students learning to speak the language) called romaji. So in that case, one could determine letter frequency.

Phew !!..yes lucky old me !!....That IS very interesting though about he Japanese romaji !  [:)]  Thank Ewe
Title: Is 'E' The Most Common Letter In Other languages That Share Our Alphabet ?
Post by: neilep on 07/10/2008 19:39:28
The simple answer is no. Can't you count?
"other languages that share our alphabet" contains 6 "a"s and only 4 "e"s

Always glad to help.
:-)

I always count my lucky stars when ewe answer my posts ! *le sigh*  [;)]