Alphabet Soup: Comparing Alphabets

Not all alphabets contain 26 letters. Here are several comparisons that have like and/or similar characters to the English alphabet(shown above).

The Swedish Alphabet - 28

The Russian Alphabet - 33

The Welsh Alphabet - 28

The Polish Alphabet - 35

The Spanish Alphabet - 30*

*A recent post on Arnold Zwicky's Blog does not list the RR as a letter and states that a recent reform has eliminated the CH and LL as separate letters of the Spanish alphabet.

For image credits click on individual alphabets.

Cursive Writing (Penmanship) and Grammatology

The February 23rd issue of Newsweek magazine contained an article by Jessica Bennett titled, "The Curse of Cursive." The article gives a brief history of penmanship and points out that, because of technology, the use of penmanship has been steadily decreasing over the years. While Bennett covers the pros and cons of the loss of penmanship, she makes it clear that she is all for "eras(ing) it for good."

Cursive writing is a system of writing and therefore falls under the science of grammatology which, as discussed yesterday, is the scientific study of writing systems.

I find cursive to be both beautiful and elegant and I think it would be a shame to lose this writing system. What do you grammatologists out there think? Please submit your comments.