Re: 1 in 1000

From: Mark Davis (markdavis@ispchannel.com)
Date: Mon Apr 24 2000 - 11:48:35 EDT


I raised something like this issue a few months ago. As I found out, it is very difficult to get good data, although all of the estimates were over 99.99%.

The wording is always very tricky, and depending on the audience you want to reach you may want to qualify it more, or simplify it. Some items you might consider:

a. You use "speaks". Most languages, even if normally written in an indigenous script, also have a Latin transcription. You may want to rule that out.
b. Many people speak more than one language. Probably safer to reverse the sense.
c. Grammatical nit. The word "less" is for mass nouns (water) and "fewer" is for count nouns (beans). You don't say /fewer water/ nor /less beans/. Percentage might be easier.

Here is an alternative:

"Over 99.99...% of the world's population speak languages whose customary written forms are represented in Unicode."

Mark

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:

> Is the following statement accurate?
>
> Probably less than one person in a thousand today speaks a language that
> cannot be reasonably represented in Unicode.
>
> Can anyone be more accurate than that? If the number is higher than 1 in
> a 1000, what scripts still need to be encoded to get the ratio below 1
> in a 1000? If it's already much less than 1 in a 1000, how low is it
> approximately? 1 in 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000?
>
> --
> +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
> | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
> +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
> | Java I/O (O'Reilly & Associates, 1999) |
> | http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/books/javaio/ |
> | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1565924851/cafeaulaitA/ |
> +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
> | Read Cafe au Lait for Java news: http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ |
> | Read Cafe con Leche for XML news: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/ |
> +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:02 EDT