From: Don Osborn (dzo@bisharat.net)
Date: Sun Jun 03 2007 - 12:49:46 CDT
There are some points here to which I'll respond on CLDR-users.
I think that Daniel's remark was intended in a light vein of speculation,
and my response sought to highlight the humorous angle (not that one heard
any laughs). No one doubts that there are important "terrestrial" issues WRT
character encoding and locales, and just for the record, Daniel has done
quite a lot in various practical areas from locales to advising students.
Don
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Philippe Verdy [mailto:verdy_p@wanadoo.fr]
> Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2007 8:35 PM
> To: 'Don Osborn'; 'Daniel Yacob'; unicode@unicode.org;
> wjposer@ldc.upenn.edu
> Subject: RE: [OT]non-terrestrial writing systems
>
> If I just consider the current data found in the CLDR language-
> territory
> map, we currently have a total of 443 languages spoken by 5,972,581,880
> persons.
>
> So there are still lots of people speaking uncovered modern languages
> (rough
> estimate, about 1.5 billion) possibly more because those CLDR estimates
> are
> only for the primary language:
>
> if I look for example at France, the CLDR data says that French is
> spoken
> only by 51 millions people out of more than 71 millions residents, and
> an
> incredibly large 16 millions people (but most probably only as a
> secondary
> language; and it forgets more common primary language spoken in France
> by
> French natives: Arabic, Berber, Rom/Tzigane, Armenian, and lots of
> other
> languages spoken by more recent immigrants with a legal residence: the
> same
> languages as well as Romanian, Polish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Persian,
> Turkish, and many African languages...). (Note that the CLDR data
> includes
> statistics for migrants, but minors the statistics for French-speaking
> US
> natives).
>
> This just confirms that the CLDR data just concentrates on the primary
> language, or at a official lingua franca for languages spoken by a
> community
> spread in very small minorities over a territory, and that are not
> directly
> identifiable. But the same data contains statistics for old regional
> languages, even though most of them are only spoken as a secondary
> language.
> The case of English in France is very significant.
>
> I'm sure that those statistics are tweaked in favour of more important
> languages, but even in this case, they are missing lots of people in
> the
> world; notably: there's data missing for the languages in:
> * [MX] Mexico, [BO] Bolivia and [PE] Peru: lots of Amerindian languages
> missing
> * [MQ] Martinique (France): French is given very low statistics,
> probably
> French Creole is missing (but in Guadeloupe, the statistics indicate
> standard French spoken by everyone, without any creole?)
> * [DZ] Algeria and [TU] Tunisia: missing Berber, Fulah (Peul)...
> * [CG] Congo-Brazzaville, [CM] Cameroon: missing lots of African
> languages
> * [CI] Côte d'Ivoire: missing lots of African languages, or statistics
> are
> most probably about 100 times too low if considering only the lingua-
> franca
> languages (only French and Koro?), possibly a input bug! Missing
> English
> too.
> * [GM] Gambia: lots of African languages
> * [ZA] South-Africa: only the official languages are listed, plus
> Swati,
> Swahili, South-Ndebele, Hindi being the only non African language
> listed
> (where is also Chinese?)
> * [RE] Reunion (France): Reunion French Creole is listed along with
> Tamil,
> but Chinese is missing* [SC] Seychelles: where are Indian languages?
> * [JE] Jersey and [GG] Guernsey: where are English, Normand, Jersiais
> and
> French?
> * [GI] Gibraltar: most probably, Spanish is missing there.
> * [RU] Russia: many Asian languages (including Chinese and Mongolian)
> and
> German, Yiddish, Hebrew...
> * [CN] China (Dem. Rep.), [MO] Macau SAR, [HK] Hong Kong SAR: missing
> Southern Chinese dialects, plus Hmong and Turkic languages.
> * [MS] Malaysia: lots of native languages
> * [PH] Philippines, [TH] Thailand: their native languages are spread
> all
> around the world through navigation
> * [ID] Indonesia: certainly lots of native languages missing
> * [CK] Cook Islands: missing Cook Islands Maori (only English listed)
> * [NC] New-Caledonia (France): missing native polynesian languages
> * [WF] Wallis-and-Futuna (France): missing native polynesian languages
>
> Most missing languages are in South-East Asian archipelagos, India,
> China,
> all over Africa, Central America, and North-West of South America. Only
> European languages and large Asian languages are "well" covered at
> least
> with the primary language plus some regional languages.
>
> And anyway, we still lack resources for important historic languages in
> the
> Middle-East.
>
> > -----Message d'origine-----
> > De : unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
> De la
> > part de Don Osborn
> > Envoyé : jeudi 31 mai 2007 23:02
> > À : verdy_p@wanadoo.fr; 'Daniel Yacob'; unicode@unicode.org;
> > wjposer@ldc.upenn.edu
> > Objet : RE: [OT]non-terrestrial writing systems
> >
> > One could start right in New Mexico, after all:
> > http://www.angelfire.com/indie/anna_jones1/roswell_hieroglyphs.html .
> Just
> > don't use those characters willy-nilly - wrong combination might get
> us
> > all
> > into big trouble.
>
>
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