Isogram
An isogram (from ancient Greek ἴσος ísos , German 'equal' and γράμμα grámma , German 'letter' ) is a text (usually a single word) in which each letter appears only once (or, in a broader sense, with the same frequency). A pangram , on the other hand, contains all letters of the alphabet at least once. A real pangram is both a pan and isogram.
Longest isograms in German
In 1988, the Society for German Language determined the longest German words from non-repeating letters in a competition. The winning word was the fantasy word “fuel oil recoil damping” with 24 letters . This was followed by "twelve-tone music book hunt", "Wildschützbärenjuxkampf" and "Boxkampf jury protégés" with 23 letters each . All four words are constructed imaginary terms that make sense in theory but do not appear in actual parlance. Without special letters, there are other fantasy words : oxide melting point colored (22), convex hull sweat bath (21), cylinder head growth (or - washable ) (20), malt whiskey scent samples (20), torrent clogging (19) , hunting knee sock hole (19).
With 19 and 18 letters there are already meaningful isograms (see table), which are rarely or not used at all. With 15 letters you can find some frequently used words, for example unproblematic, educational project, intermediate product, complicity, entanglement of power, sports club boss, sausage tip .
| length | word | Internet use 2012 | comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 24 | Fuel oil recoil damping | Rare | Winner of the above competition |
| 23 | Boxing match jury protégés | - | |
| 22nd | oxide melting point colored | - | (Something the color that an oxide is at its melting point) |
| 21st | Plush figure wall object | - | (conceivable work of an object artist) |
| 20th | Village square target practice | - | (conceivable target practice on a village square) |
| 20th | Video market deletion exercise | - | (Fire brigade exercise in a video market) |
| 20th | Shock absorber cooling | - | (conceivable on vehicle test tracks) |
| 19th | Boxing match description | barely | without umlauts and ß |
| 19th | Technical training project | barely | without umlauts and ß |
| 18th | Big cats vaccination book | - | (possible vaccination book in the zoo) |
| 18th | Garlic spice dip | barely | |
| 18th | Pranksters | - | (possible translation for flash mobs) |
| 17th | Office space turnover | frequently | (Term from the real estate industry) |
| 17th | Focus of dialogue | frequently | without umlauts and ß |
| 17th | Cell phone call | frequently | |
| 17th | Cup lettering | frequently | without umlauts and ß |
| 17th | Deer control | Rare | |
| 16 | Dialect research | frequently | is often wrongly named as the longest isogram actually used without umlauts and ß |
| 16 | Pole screw clamp | Rare | (Screw clamp for connecting an earth cable) |
Other languages and scripts
The Qianziwen Chinese 千字文 is a classic example of the Chinese script . In the philosophical-pedagogical text, composed around the year 500, a thousand Chinese characters appear without any repetition.
In Japanese , the Iroha poem , which consists of 47 syllables, was used as the traditional "alphabet" for the Kana character inventories. In the poem, which may have been specially created for this purpose, each basic kana (without the variants with diacritics) occurs exactly once (isogram and real pangram). The “soft” and “hard” variants of the basic forms are excluded here, as are the letters Ä, Ö and Ü used in the German alphabet. Iroha alphabet (more rarely also: Irohani alphabet) is called after its initial syllables (analogous to the designation ABC for Latin alphabets). The poem reads (reproduced in Hepburn-Romaji, but in the old pronunciation):
i ro ha ni ho he to
chi ri nu ru wo
wa ka yo ta re so
tsu ne na ra mu
u wi no o ku ya ma
ke fu ko e te
a sa ki yu me mi shi
we hi mo se su.
In German roughly reproduced with
How wonderfully scented flowers wither,
no one can last forever,
let us cross the mountains of transience today,
no more shallow dreams will happen,
nor drunkenness guide us.
In more modern textbooks, the Iroha alphabet is usually no longer used for learning, but a representation of the Kana inventory as in most Indian scriptures, i.e. in a table systematically sorted according to sound groups ("aiueo - ka ki ku ke ko -" and so on) without further significance. This representation, which has been common since the Meiji period, is called gojūon in Japanese (German "fifty lute" table).
For Sanskrit, there is both an isogram and a pangram, the poem form of the Shiva sutras or Maheshvara sutras corresponding to the Iroha , a fourteen -stanza poem with all Sanskrit phonemes as given in the authoritative grammar of Panini .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Siegfried Röder: The longest German word without letter repetitions . In: Deutschschweizerischer Sprachverein (Ed.): Sprachspiegel . Bimonthly. tape 45 , no. 4 , August 1989, ISSN 0038-8513 , pp. 121 ( e-periodica.ch [accessed June 25, 2019]).