I wasn't planning on posting a comic about this yet, but people have spammed me with the "ÆØÅ (Size Matters)" song so much that I thought I might as well post it now to let people know that yes, I have seen it.
(Before you click the link, know that the song isn't about who has the biggest alphabet in the world, but simply about the Norwegians desperately looking for something they have that's bigger than what USA has) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f488uJAQgmw
@ZanarNaryon - Got it from Norway, yes, since our early settlers came from there Icelandic is basically ancient Norse (though not ancient Norwegian - just a language in the Nordic area).
@Icybeach Actually, not to start an argument, but Mandarin Chinese is bigger. Have you seen the size of our phonetics system (PinYin)? a, o, e, i, u, ü, b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r, z, c, s, y, w, ai, ei, ui, ao, ou, iu, ie, üe, er, an, en, in, un, ün, ang, eng, ing, ong. That's the actual order that the alphabet is in, and this isn't counting the 5 tones we have for each of our 6 vowels.
Wait.... How do you type those.... letters? Do you like have to memorize the ALt-code for them!?! Does your keyboard look different then ours!?! Oh-Nose! you have a bigger keyboard the I do.... Quick, grab me a 50 Cal. and a Malt 44., I need to over compensate for this revelation!
@Leowic Well some keys on your keyboards are replaced with other keys such as § ö ä å, but they replace keys that you have like / which we have to press shift and then 7 in order to type. Also i think you can do ö and ä by pressing the ¨ key if you have one.
@Leowic I don't know how it works in Scandinavia but the German keyboard is indeed different and bigger: we have the ö and the ändern next to the l and the ü next to the p. Also our y and z are changed and we have the ß next to the 0,I guess ... but that's still low level ... try with french: they have like every single key at the wrong place. And yes, in German we have 4 additional letters ... I like it ... it's special (even though it used to be 5 bc there were 2 versions of ß)
This reminds me of that time when i found a danish children's book at my grandmothers house and i was so confused because i thought that the ø letter was a o that had ben crossed over because the author regretted writing it
@Eyjarkonan ÖÁÍÝÉ doesn't count, since they're only latin letters with dots and lines over. I can give you Þ and Ð, though. (THough you actually got that from us)
@Mr_MK in ways they kinda dont have an alphabet
there is zhuyin fuhao which is used only really in Taiwan which has around 36 "letters" in it
you use em to make the the sounds and chose the character
in China, they only really used pinyin which just uses the english alphabet
@zhouhuanyue in hong kong, i believe they use cangjie which is so weird
they do not use that based off of sound, they base it off of what the character looks like
in my opinion, it's very confusing xD
@zhouhuanyue Actually, that's true for most Asian languages. For example, Tamil, my language, is an "abugida". It has most consonants, but the glyphs (like ◌̊ in Å) don't represent a specific sound change for the same letter. They represent vowels instead. Its vowels are A, E, AI, I, O, AU. Also, fun fact: Tamil has 246 letters, and more than 400 if you count the glyphs together. Here's a little "hello" in my language:
வணக்கம்
Yes, confusing. Also, the dot means there is no glyph. So there is a glyph saying there is no glyphs? Weird, right?
Explanation: If there is no glyph, it has the a sound after it. If the dot is there, it removes any sound. But that doesn't mean you can add a vowel, then add the dot (it's called a "virama").