Nanna and What Letter Frequency Tells a Reader

The letters of the painti are very unevenly used, and the distribution is worth knowing for reasons beyond curiosity. A high frequency letter such as Nanna, Dadda or Sassa appears in almost every line, so its form is what a reader recognises without conscious effort and what a scribe writes most automatically. That has three consequences. In palaeography, the treatment of the commonest letters characterises a hand more reliably than the treatment of a rare one, because there are hundreds of instances to compare rather than a handful.

In typography, the commonest letters set the colour of the page, so a fount that renders them a little too heavy or too narrow will look wrong overall even when every individual letter is defensible. And in teaching, the commonest letters are what make early reading possible, since a learner who knows twelve letters well can read more than one who knows thirty poorly. Traditional teaching of the painti runs in strict order regardless, because the order is part of the inheritance being passed on, but materials for second language learners frequently reorder on exactly this ground. Nanna would appear early in any such reordering and late in none, which is a fair summary of its place in the script.