Hog-Morse For instance, the international code has only two symbols, dots and dashes, but the American code has several lengths of dash. There is a distinction between "L" () and "T" (). Also, in the international code the space between symbols within a character is always the same, but American Morse has two different spaces. The letters "S" (), "C" (), and "R" () all consist of three dots, but the timing is different in each case. A frequently quoted, but possibly apocryphal, story from the historical period concerns the similarity of "L" and "T" in the American code. A company
Morse code abbreviations provided by the prosigns for Morse code, the International Q code, Z code, RST code, the telegraph era Phillips Code and many well known Morse code abbreviations as discussed in this Wikipedia article. Together all of these traditional conventions serve as a somewhat cryptic but commonly understood language (Lingua Franca) within the worldwide community of amateur radio Morse code operators. These codes and protocols efficiently encode many well known statements and questions from many languages into short simple character groups which may be sent manually very quickly. The international Q code for instance encodes literally hundreds of full normal language