I agree with Michael: these statements are fraught with
problems, and have more potential to hinder the advancement of
lesser used languages than they do to promote the adoption of
Unicode.
The original wording is problematic in ways that Mark has
pointed out. Even Mark's wording is problematic, however: there
is still a significant portion of the world's population whose
first language is either unwritten or for which writing has
only recently been introduced. It is certainly premature to say
that these languages are supported by Unicode (though they
potentially could be, depending upon future orthography
decisions -- *any* language in the world can be written with
Latin script if the user community chooses to do so). Based on
some info I've seen on these languages, I'd estimate that this
may account for around 5% of the world's population. It may be,
if we knew enough, that some of these should be counted as
already supported by Unicode, but then this figure doesn't
consider languages written with those scripts that are not yet
covered by Unicode, or languages with writing systems that are
only partially covered by Unicode.
The upshot is that statements of the sort being put forth here
are really not much more than speculative conjecture, that
figures like 99.9% are most likely wrong, and that coming up
with any really accurate figures is still problematic. On the
other hand, if you want to pick a safe figure, like 90%, then I
don't think there is a problem. (I wouldn't have qualms with
slightly higher figures like 93% except that that is not
rounded and so sounds more like it's based on some verifiable
measure when it's not.)
Peter
From: <markdavis@ispchannel.com> AT Internet on 04/24/2000
07:48 AM
To: Peter Constable/IntlAdmin/WCT, <unicode@unicode.org> AT
Internet@Ccmail
cc: <unicode@unicode.org> AT Internet@Ccmail
Subject: Re: 1 in 1000
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 rea ch you may want to qualify it more, or
simplify it. Some items you might conside
r:
a. You use "speaks". Most languages, even if normally written
in an indigenous s cript, 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 m
ight be easier.
Here is an alternative:
"Over 99.99...% of the world's population speak languages whose
customary writte n 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