RE: Unicode 3.0 press statements

From: Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com
Date: Thu Jan 20 2000 - 14:05:45 EST


Hi, Janko.

I feel I am polluting the list with too much off-topic stuff, so I will keep
this private.

You wrote:
>> *** Latin script
>> (...)
>As far as I know here somewhere must be Serbian -- especially counting
>people out of the main country (Serbs in Bosnia, for example). If 10M is
>not reliable, although cited somewhere, 8M is much more certain number.

>> *** Cyrillic script
>> (...)
>As far as I know, here somewhere must be Serbian again.

I quoted from the Ethnologue:
>*** Languages using more than one script
> 21000000 SERBO-CROATIAN (Latin and Cyrillic)

O yes. I know that the current vogue is to turn that hyphen into a comma.
The fact is that I didn't know how to split that 21M. Now I have your 8..10M
estimate, but I still have my doubts about what a language is and what it
would be without an army.

I quoted from the Ethnologue:
> 37000000 ITALIAN
> 8974000 LOMBARD

And this makes my doubts bigger: I am from Lombardy, Italy: in what line
have I been counted? Lombardy does not have an army (or I hope not, but
maybe yes: we have indipendentists going around in green shirts trying to
beat immigrants), so I never really perceived these as two different
languages; I use one or the other according to the situation; I freely mix
them; sometimes I have problems understanding which is which, so why are
they in the list?

You wrote:
>Now I am becoming affraid that people who had to make lists like this
>supported bombing just to solve such problems, like "where to count
>them" (joke).

I am still trying to figure out the reason why. It is certainly not the
fault of people running the Ethnologue web site, they are too buisi counting
languages. Nor mine: I was too buisy doing demonstrations against NATO and
becoming a father.

Ciao.
        Marco



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