Easy Trivia

[Red Frog]

21 characters

Including "-"?!

Do full names count?  

Herbert Henry Saxon Bertie Cordey Lyon
http://www.swindon-town-fc.co.uk/Person.asp?PersonID=LYONBERT

Respect - What's the shortest then?

[Simon Pieman]

Yes, why should the hyphen be excluded?

[Red Frog]

Um, because it's not a letter, it's punctuation.

[flammableBen]

But it does add to the length of the name. Even if you only count it as 1/5th of a letter.

[Red Frog]

Except you don't count it as any fraction of a letter. If you really want to argue it makes the name longer, then it's by about 2mm, depending on font-size.

[flammableBen]

Using a fixed width font it's the same width at any of the letters. It should at least count for something.

2mm on standard size forum post fonts is probably more than a fifth, closer to a third or a half on most letters, even longer than some.

[Simon Pieman]

Who said anything about letters? We're talking about length. Maybe we should do number of syllables.

[flammableBen]

Who said anything about letters? We're talking about length. Maybe we should do number of syllables.

Some syllables are longer than others too, might have to do some wikipedia research on different types.

[Red Frog]

You're right, look:

Herbert Henry Saxon Bertie Cordey Lyon

very short

Simon Cox

very long.

You're geniuses. I'm so hidebound by traditional counting methods. I bow to your lateral thinking skills.

[flammableBen]

If you can't take the comparison of the lengths of football player's names seriously then maybe you shouldn't take part in the discussion?

[Red Frog]

I'll leave you clever types to it, but I thought you'd be interested to see that you're right about some syllables - and specifically vowels - being longer than others. So that in linguistics the English vowel sounds oo, ah, er, or and ee are known as long vowels, indicated in phonetic notation by a colon after their symbol, whereas those in tit, tat, tut, tot, soot, the and net are short. The vowel sounds in ay, oi, oh and I are different again - they're diphthongs. Consonants don't having varying phonetic length. And I think that covers it.

Monty Python hit on the same idea when they talked about woody vs tinny words.

So if you can find a footballer with a maximum combination of long vowels and diphthongs and plenty of syllables, he's your man. Clue: I'd look to see if we've had any Madagascan or Sri Lankan players first.

Sweet dreams.

[flammableBen]

Well if you've got all this linguistics knowledge to actually be of help on this important issue why were you fucking about changing the font size of Simon Cox? Quite frankly I find your attitude to be a bit childish.

[Red Frog]