“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is probably the most famous pangram* in English.
There are others, of course: “Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymph,” and “Zing! Vext cwm fly jabs Kurd qoph.” Many of these others are remarkably non-catchy.
Pangrams can’t be an English language-only phenomenon. What are the most popular or famous ones in other languages? German, French, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Esperanto, whatever.
Subquestion: do languages with other alphabets have pangrams – Russian, for instance? How about Arabic? I can’t believe that Mandarin has pangrams, but is there a similar kind of word game that they play with their characters?
*Pangram: a group of words, usually a sentence, containing all the letters of the alphabet.
“Max brændte høj og flyvsk quiz på wc” which roughly translates to “Max burned tall and flighty quiz in the bathroom”. (Are you allowed to use names in pangrams?)
I can’t find any references to common Danish pangrams although we should be able to construct them more easily thanks to three extra vowels. We’d probably have to use a few imported words, however, there aren’t many native words with qwxz’s in them.
I’ve always used the quick brown fox for typing exercises.
Why not? Two of the Japanese scripts are syllabic rather than pictographic, so the number of symbols is more than manageable. And IIRC, Korean uses a rather nifty alphabetic script where the letters are stacked on top of each other.
I take it you mean that it doesn’t have any perfect pangrams, since it’s entirely possible to construct a German sentence using all 26 letters (plus the sharp S and the three umlauted vowels, if you’re so inclined).
35 letters, actually. The “ae” in “Boxkaempfer” would normally be written as “ä”.
It uses each hiragana (phonetic alphabet) exactly once. This used to be the standard hiragana order, but it has been replaced by a more logical grid table with 5 rows for the 5 vowels and 9 columns of consonant sounds plus one column of pure vowel sounds.
“pa’s wijze lynx bezag vroom het fikse aquaduct”.
Dad’s wise lynx looked piously at the large aquaduct. Not a very good pangram, but hey, it does the job.
I’ve tried to find a better one, but have never really got a satisfactory one. My best was:
“Exact vijf voor twaalf had de psycholoog zijn quotum bereikt”.
Exactly five to twelve the psychologist had reached his quotum.
As you can see, all those are much longer than The quick brown fox. I gather it is difficult to make a short one in a different language than English. English uses quite a lot of those odd letters like x and q.
Without any attempt to answer Interrobang!?'s original question, I thought I’d drop in to recommend Douglas Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language to anyone who is interested in matters of this sort. Though pangrams are not what the book is about (and in fact I’m not certain they’re even mentioned, specifically), palindromes, and the various levels of difficulty of creating palindromes in different languages, are discussed. The book is about translation as a concept, for starters, though like all Hofstadter’s books it ranges rather broadly and deeply, covering a lot of ground. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and recommend it heartily to anybody interested in language or translation.
And now back to our regularly scheduled discussion.
I don’t know enough about langauges without alphabets to know what I’m asking, if that helps any. But basically, is, say, Mandarin in non-Romanized characters organized in a way that allows people to try to use every organizational category in a work as concisely yet understandably as possible?
(More understandable than that last sentence, even.)
In languages with a large number of characters (e.g. Chinese and Japananese Kanji), there is no such thing as a complete list of characters. The Japanese government has a list of characters that can be used for a person’s name, but even that is revised occasionally.