Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 January 1915 — TELEGRAPHESE’ BEST TO USE [ARTICLE]

TELEGRAPHESE’ BEST TO USE

Correspondent Finds English Lai* guage to ?*e the Tersest in Europe. Which language makes the. best telegraphese” At so ranch a word one might hasten to say German, because nf ita purely typographical device of sticking a number of words together to look like one compound word. We really do exactly the same thing in 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 tor a single word. Any word, longer that counts as two; or as three —if it gets beyond the second ten, as some German Words do. When it comes to counting letters or making up intelligible telegraphese, English; it seems, is the tersest language in Europe. An Italian newspaper correspondent has lately dlscov-

ered this In telegraphing news from ■London to his paper jn Italy. At the beginning of the war he used Italian Then when all languages except Eng lish an.^ -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.