This piece is inspired by current events (now called breaking news), which led me to discover that Kalaallit Nunaat is what the natives (Inuit) call their land, not Green or Groen, and their language is Kalaallisut (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sTsDyiJtSo )! Counter-inuitive for the likes of Dolund and his ilk, but it set me thinking about a pet theme of mine. Which is this: the disappearance of which letters would do the most damage to keyboard communication in a given language? Years ago, I posted a piece on this blog called Dotting your i's in Istanbul, which, among other things, was a reflection on the non-universality of of QWERTY keyboards. At the time, without recourse to N-grams, frequency analysis of letters in a language and no knowledge of Turkish (other than Eartha Kitt's hilarious rendition of Üsküdar'a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty7JQiNPlJY ]), my impression was that the best one consonant sabotage for Turkish would be malfunction of the letter k. A little game I play to amuse myself whenever I come into contact with a new language is to think about this sabotage theme, which, it seems to me, gives you a peek into the soul of a language and its culture. So here's my random list of languages and sabotage consonants, in the cases where I feel bold enough to make a conjecture. Any incautious reader of this piece is invited to make sugggestions to fill in the blanks in the table below. Of course, this game is now demodé, since you can just go to https://en.wikitionary.org/wiki/Wikitionary:Frequency_lists and look for whichever language you want.
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