By that logic German uses a thirty letter alphabet, but no one says so.

_0nac · on April 25, 2018

Does too. Finnish, for example, has a 29-letter alphabet, because diacritics count separately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_orthography

That said, letter with diacritic vs separate letter is a surprisingly fraught topic, the same character can be considered a letter in one language and not a letter in another. Look up collation rules in European languages for a real nightmare...

_dcwr · on April 25, 2018

Are you really telling us Slavs that we are wrong in what we (and our governments, educational systems and language authorities) consider a letter in our native languages and should stop saying our alphabets have however many letters we say they do for decades now because Germans happen to use different logic when counting their letters..?

I mean.. really?

I'm so astonished by that logic I don't even know what to tell you. Different languages can have different rules you know.

Edit: thanks for the downvote. How dare I tell a person who just claimed half of Europe is composing their alphabets wrong because Germans do it differently that they are short sighted.

eCa · on April 26, 2018

> Are you really telling us Slavs[...]

Absolutely not. My argument was that Kazakh is far from unique in having ”extra letters”, which my native language’s alphabet also has.

On a personal level I far prefer latin-alphabet Slavic languages since it makes it easier to approximate an understandable pronunciation.

fusiongyro · on April 26, 2018

Is that a feature of the orthography or does that simply tell us something about your personal background?

_dcwr · on April 26, 2018

That was a reply to the person who has said that it's wrong to say Czech has 42 letters because Germans count their letters differently, not to you.

I of course agree with there not being a problem with extra letters because Polish does it without any significant problems as well.

blattimwind · on April 26, 2018

> Are you really

No.