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Boise Ed sends this in. [Бојси Ед го испраќа ова]

“The modern Macedonian alphabet consists of 31 letters, including 5 vowels (А, Е, И, О, У) and 26 consonants, with six letters unique to Macedonian: Ѓ (gj), Ѕ (dz), Ј (j), Љ (lj), Њ (nj), and Ќ (kj). It was officially codified in 1945 by a commission in Yugoslav Macedonia….Spoken as a first language by around 1.7 million people, it serves as the official language of North Macedonia.^[” (Wikipedia)

Six unique letters in a written language that’s the primary language of only 1.7 million people. In the age of computers, that’s a fairly easily solvable problem by designing a font. One wonders, though, how this worked back in the typewriter era. I get the implication that perhaps they used a Cyrillic typewriter with combinations of letters, such as the Cyrillic version of kj for Ќ.

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Speaking of Great Blue Herons, there’s a rookery near me. You can see the nests high up in the trees — about as high up as they could put them, considering the males are about 5 lb and the females about 3 lb, plus the weight of the nest and the eggs / hatchlings. The rookery is persistent — it’s been in the same location at least 5 years now. The arrival of the young roughly coincides with the trees getting covered with leaves, so the nests can’t easily be seen.

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