Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

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Sglod
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Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

Post by Sglod »

English has 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog' and 'Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs'.
Does anyone have any of these for other languages (natlangs and conlangs) ?

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gufferdk
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Re: Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

Post by gufferdk »

Danish has "Quizdeltagerne spiste jordbær med fløde mens cirkusklovnen Walter spillede på xylofon" which translates to "The quiz participants ate strawberries with cream while the circus clown Walter played the xylophone".
It is quite long and unwieldy because <c q w x z> are not used in native words, and are quite rare overall.
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linguoboy
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Re: Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

Post by linguoboy »

The term of art for these sentences is "holoalphabetic sentence" or "pangram", and searching those terms should turn up plenty of examples.

Probably the best-known one for German is "Victor jagt zwölf Boxkämpfer quer über den großen Sylter Deich". A perfect pangram (i.e. one containing each character exactly once) is "„Fix, Schwyz!“ quäkt Jürgen blöd vom Paß."

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KathTheDragon
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Re: Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

Post by KathTheDragon »

linguoboy wrote:A perfect pangram (i.e. one containing each character exactly once) is "„Fix, Schwyz!“ quäkt Jürgen blöd vom Paß."
Where's "u"?

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linguoboy
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Re: Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

Post by linguoboy »

KathTheDragon wrote:
linguoboy wrote:A perfect pangram (i.e. one containing each character exactly once) is "„Fix, Schwyz!“ quäkt Jürgen blöd vom Paß."
Where's "u"?
After the q?

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KathTheDragon
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Re: Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

Post by KathTheDragon »

Oh, so it is.

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Re: Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

Post by zompist »

We can hardly mention the topic without citing the 26-letter Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz. (Using the Welsh cwm is a bit of a stretch... on the other hand, this sentence will teach you a neat word! What seems weirder these days is the sense 'strange person' for quiz.)

You can have pangrams in a syllabary; the standard example is the iroha poem.

It's hard to do with logographs (not least because these tend to be an open-ended category), but you gotta admit that the writer of the Thousand Character Classic gave it the old college try.

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Nortaneous
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Re: Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

Post by Nortaneous »

Cwm fjord veg balks nth pyx quiz. (Relaxing in basins at the end of inlets terminates the endless tests from the box.)
Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz. (Carved symbols in a mountain hollow on the bank of an inlet irritated an eccentric person.)
Jink cwm, zag veldt, fob qursh pyx. (Cross valley and plain to steal coins from Saudi mint.)
Junky qoph-flags vext crwd zimb. (An Abyssinian fly playing a Celtic violin was annoyed by trashy flags on which were the Hebrew letter qoph.)
Squdgy fez, blank jimp crwth vox! (A short brimless felt hat barely blocks out the sound of a Celtic violin.)
Veldt jynx grimps waqf zho buck (A grass-plains wryneck climbs upon a male yak-cattle hybrid that was donated under Islamic law.)
Bortz waqf glyphs vex muck djin. (Signage indicating endowments for industrial diamonds annoy filth-spreading genies.)

(source)

(NB: a crwth is a bowed lyre, not a "Celtic violin")
Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

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KathTheDragon
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Re: Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

Post by KathTheDragon »

Most of that doesn't even look English.

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Gulliver
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Re: Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

Post by Gulliver »

zompist wrote:We can hardly mention the topic without citing the 26-letter Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz. (Using the Welsh cwm is a bit of a stretch... on the other hand, this sentence will teach you a neat word! What seems weirder these days is the sense 'strange person' for quiz.).
Vext is what struck me as odd here. Cwm (or combe as it's anglicized round 'ere) just sounds place-namey to me.

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Re: Sentences that contain the whole alphabet

Post by Jonlang »

Gulliver wrote:Cwm (or combe as it's anglicized round 'ere) just sounds place-namey to me.
Cwm appears in a lot of place names in South Wales, particularly (and unsurprisingly) in the Valleys. People of the Valleys tend to use the word cwm instead of valley when speaking English: "I'm going up the cwm" meaning to the upper-end of the valley or "I'm going over the cwm" meaning over the mountain to the next valley. North Wales tends to use dyffryn for place names instead, although there is a tiny village called Cwm in Denbighshire. No Welsh speaker I've asked seems to know if there's any difference between the words cwm and dyffryn and are used interchangeably, apparently.
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