Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 310, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 December 1914 — ‘TELEGRAPHESE’ BEST TO USE [ARTICLE]

‘TELEGRAPHESE’ BEST TO USE

Correspondent Find* English Language to Be the Tersest In Europe. Which language makes the best telegraphese ? At so much a word one might hasten to say German, because of its purely typographical device of sticking a .number of words together to look like one compound word. We really do exactly the same thing in English, only we print the elements of

the compound as separate 'words. But in international telegraphing there is a word length limit (or, as the Germans would print a wordlengthlimit). Ten letters is the'maximum allowed for a single word. Any word longer than that counts as two; or.as three —if it gets beyond the second ten, as some German ttords do. w When it comes to counting letters or making up intelligible telegraphese, English, it seems, is the tersest language tn Europe. An Italian newspaper correspondent has lately discov-

ered this in telegraphing news from London to his paper in Italy. At the beginning of the war he used Italian Then when all languages except Eng lish and French were forbidden hi took French. Later, finding that French, though accepted by the post office, seemed to cause delay, he changed to English, and to his surprise he finds that he is saving quite a lot of money in telegraph fees owing to the superior brevity of the English language as compared with French or Italian.