“[Footnote] The Phoenicians employed an alphabet of twenty-one consonants. They left no literature. You can't be literary without a few vowels.”

— Will Cuppy

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Hannibal

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Will Cuppy 119

American writer 1884–1949

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Florian Cajori in: A History of Mathematical Notations http://books.google.co.in/books?id=_byqAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT961&dq=Notations&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Wz65U5WYDIKulAW1qIGYDA&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Notation&f=false, Courier Dover Publications, 26 September 2013, p. 47.

“In English we have noticed twenty-five consonant and about twenty vowel phonemes. Although individual pronunciations may differ, the phonemic habits of the same group or class will be similar. They will make similar use of heterophony. Words not phonetically separated — that is, homophones — may be separated by function or by experiential context”

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