Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Shorten English

One of the complaints about English might be that the words are too long(Let's not talk about the length of German words!). Because there are so many borrowed words in English, you can't say that there is one set of rules for pronouncing English. So a lot of the letters in an English word seem without a purpose. For an establishment in Taiwan that wants to use English in their signage they have to make some judicious choices.

Everyone knows "Cleopatra", but it doesn't take the whole word to get the message across.
Similarly, the word "diamond" has a lot of letters that are not needed.

But the worst offending word is probably "coffee", it seems to have an extra "f" and an extra "e" that are superfluous.
Spelling it this way has a double bonus, because the word "cafe" comes to mind.

But the length of the word can have real consequences, here it the address of my dormitory. If they had used the word "Development" they would have had to find a bigger(much bigger) rock. Notice how nicely the Chinese characters do the job.

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