Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 January 1915 — ‘TELEGRAPHESE’ BEST TO USE [ARTICLE]
‘TELEGRAPHESE’ BEST TO USE
Correspondent Finds 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 pnrely typographical device of ■ticking a number of words together to look like -eng 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 —ls 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, 1b the tersest language in Europe. " An Italian newsuaper 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, f 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 quits a lot of money in telegraph, fees owing to the superior brevity of the English, language as compared with French or Italian, i:
