From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Wed Oct 22 2003 - 03:17:08 CST
Mark Davis wrote:
> BTW, some time ago I had generated a pie chart of world GDP
> divided up by language.
Those quotients are immoral.
Of course, this immorality is not the fault of he who did the calculation:
the immorality is out there, and those infamous numbers are just an
arithmetical expressions of it.
In practice, those quotients say that, e.g., Italian (spoken by 50 millions
people or less) is more important than Hindi (spoken by nearly one billion
people), just because an average Italian is richer than an average Indian.
In other terms, each Indian (or any other citizen from poor countries) has
1/20 or less of the linguistic rights of an Italian (or any other citizen
from rich countries).
BTW, by summing up languages written with the same script, it is easy to
derive the "immoral quotients" of writing systems:
Latin 59.13%
Han 20.60%
Arabic 3.82%
Cyrillic 2.99%
Devanagari 2.54%
Hangul 1.84%
Thai 0.87%
Bengali 0.44%
Telugu 0.42%
Greek 0.40%
Tamil 0.34%
Gujarati 0.26%
_ Marco
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