• cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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    15 days ago

    The Russian says:

    Вьетнамский народ вечно благодарен великому Ленину

    Or in the Latin alphabet:

    “V’yetnamskiy narod vechno blagodaren velikomu Leninu”

    That’s 18 syllables if i’m not mistaken.

    Translates to “The Vietnamese people are eternally grateful to the great Lenin”

    I guess the Vietnamese leaves out the first two words, but even without that part the Russian is still 50% longer.

    Of course Chinese wins on character efficiency over both of them: 永远感谢伟大的列宁

    But that’s not really a fair comparison because in Chinese every character is a syllable.

    • kredditacc@lemmygrad.ml
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      15 days ago

      If Vietnamese still use Chữ Nôm then every character would also be a syllable.

      But then again, a CJKV character (Hanzi, Kanji, Hangul, Chữ Nôm) is technically a character according to unicode, but it is not a unit of writing. A CJKV character have components and strokes, and the components may have components of their own. OTOH, nobody actually thinks of a latin character as having components (seriously, what are the components of the letter “A”?)