If you type =rnd() into a Microsoft Word document then press enter, then on your screen will appear a sentence containing all the letters of the alphabet once and only once. The The exact sentence depends on what language you have Microsoft Word in. In English, the sentence is The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. You can see what sentences are used in other languages here.
Now here’s my challenge for you. I would like to see who can come up with the shortest text containing all the letters of the alphabet in the correct order. Obviously in this case letters may be repeated. What you write must be grammatically coherent and spelt correctly. For the sake of clarity, each time you write the next letter of the alphabet, please use a capital letter. So, your sentence could begin like this:
ABraham Can DancE FriGHtenIngly quickly. James can maKe LeMoNade…
Complete gibberish, but grammatically correct. There will be a winner for each language: the person whose text has the least number of characters, including space bars and punctuation (but you cannot leave out punctuation if it makes your text grammatically incorrect).
For French, Catalan and Spanish, use the following alphabets:
French: abcçdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Catalan: abcçdefghijkl l·l mnopqrstuvwxyz
Spanish: abc ch defghijkl ll mnñopqrstuvwxyz
When you post your answer, please enter an e-mail address you haven’t used on here before (make one up if you like). That way, your answer will not be visible to others until I’ve moderated it.
the “l·l”, “k”, “w” and “y” make it terribly difficult in Catalan! :-)
Difficult, but not impossible. I don’t think the l·l should be too much of a problem. It’s in lots of words. As for the others, if it helps, remember you can use proper nouns (you could always talk about a kiwi, and write it twice – once for the k and once for the w).