On 01.03.2018 06:33, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote:
> 2018-02-28 14:22 GMT+01:00 Christoph Päper via
> Unicode <unicode_at_unicode.org [1]>:
>
>>> There are approximately 7,000 living human languages,
>>> but fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on
>> computers,
>>> mobile phones, and other devices.
>
> Fewer than 100 languages is a bit small, I can count nearly about 200
> languages well supported with all the necessary basic support to
> develop them with content. The limitation however is elsewhere: in
> education and litteracy level for these languages so that people
> start
> using them as well on the web and in other medias or use them more
> easily in their daily life and improve the quality and coverage of
> data available in these languages. This includes developing an
> orthography (many languages dont have any developed and supported
> orthography, even if there was attempts to create dictionnaries,
> including online with Wikitionary).
>
> With the encoded scripts, you can already type and view correctly
> thousands of languages. This these languages are living, it should
> not
> be difficult to support most of them with the existing scripts that
> are already encoded (weve reched the point where we only have to
> encode historic scripts, to preserve the cultures or languages that
> have disappeared or are dying fast since the begining of the 20th
> century). Even if major languages will persist and regional languages
> will die, this should not be done without reintegrating in those
> major
> languages some significant parts of the past regional cultures, which
> can still become sources for enriching these major languages so that
> they become more precise and more useful and allow then easier access
> to past regional languages, possibly then directly in their original
> script, with people then able to decipher them or being interested to
> study them. Past languages and preserved texts will then remain as a
> rich source for keeping existing languages alive, vivid, productive
> for new terms, without having to necessarily borrow terms from less
> than 20 large "international" languages (ar, de, en, es, fa, fr, nl,
> id, ja, ko, pt, ru, hi, zh), written in only 6 well developed scripts
> (Arab, Latn, Cyrl, Deva, Hang, Hans, Jpan).
>
Pen, or brush and paper is much more flexible. With thousands of names
of people and places still not encoded I am not sure if I would describe
hans (simplified Chinese characters) as well supported. nor with current
policy which limits China with over one billion people to submitting
less than 500 Chinese characters a year on average, and names not being
all to be added, it is hard to say which decade hans will be well
supported.
John Knightley
>
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] mailto:unicode_at_unicode.org
Received on Wed Feb 28 2018 - 21:31:42 CST
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