Re: FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts

[Mark Davis ☕️]

Hmmm. How accurate can it be? They forgot Austria, and got Switzerland
wrong by almost a power of 10.


Mark 

*— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —*

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:18 AM, Denis Jacquerye  wrote:

> The South China Morning Post published a similar infographic:
> A world of languages - and how many speak them
>
> http://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1810040/infographic-world-languages
>

Re: FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts

[Denis Jacquerye]

The South China Morning Post published a similar infographic:
A world of languages - and how many speak them
http://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1810040/infographic-world-languages

Re: FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts

[Luis de la Orden]

As a speaker of both Portuguese (mother tongue, native) and Spanish
(father, not native anymore) with a Catalan connection (dad was from
Barcelona and I lived there for a few months, amazing language, love it to
bits), I would say these two languages are closer to each other than
Italian to Portuguese. But never as close to consider them the same I can
assure you :).

In fact, even European Portuguese can be a bit hermetic to understand
although they understand Brazilian Portuguese better. This is all down to
the fact that they import more cultural products such as books and TV
programmes from Brazil than the other way around. European Portuguese
speakers say that the way we tonalise and inflect the language is softer
but I believe that they understand us due to exposure to the language which
in turn teaches them to decipher our pronunciation and the Brazilian
linguistic idiosyncracies.

Re: FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts

[Philippe Verdy]

Italian and Portuguese are difficult to understand between each other
(especially in speech: Italians speak really too fast)


On the opposite, exchanges between Standard French and Iberian Portuguese
is really easy, with low time of adaptation, either for native French
coming in Portugal for the first time, or native Portugueses coming in
France. Also there's not much difficulties between French Guiana and Brazil
for the two regional variants of the two "standard" languages.

Native Portuguese ans native French use approximately the same syntaxic
structure, similar phonology, similar rythms, and there's a large common
lexicon (also with imports from alsmost the same set of modern foreign
languages or historical languages), if this still does not work, reading
remains easy, and beside minor grammatical termination differences the
lexical roots are the same for most words, many words in Portuguese are
borrowed directly from French with very minor changes; the creation of new
words also use a similar system of prefixes and suffixes which are nearly
identical.

This is not true with modern Italian that has accumulated lots of phonetic
transforms since Latin, and that has mixed very different sets of regional
minority languages. And where the transformation of meanings (creation of
new lemmas of the same term, creation of irregular words composed by fusion
and many mutations) was much deeper in Italian than in French and
Portuguese (which were more conservative).

But if we speak about Hindi and Urdu, for long it was considered the same
language in speech (the writing systems in Urdu were separated only for
religious reasons, but religious texts could not be read by a vast majority
of people in India. They were really splitted in two languages only when
education and litteracy progressed a lot sarting in the middle of the 20th
century, and after the indepedence of India, then the separation of
Pakistan.

So the practical difficult differences are only for the written script, but
as Urdu is also spoken in India, it is also still written with the
Devanagari script (in which case it becomes relatively easy to read by
native Hindi readers). Arabic-Devanagari Transliterators are still heavily
used for Urdu in India. But if Urdu native speakers don't want Hindi, they
choose to communicate in English (as a de facto interchange language
understood by both communities in India, but also by many Urdu speakers in
Pakistan).

For many things, Urdu and Hindi are in a situation quite similar to Serbian
Cyrillic vs.Croatian (and the Serbian Latin transliteration is often named
"Serbocroatian" and can be used also as an interchange language. Bosnian
(or more recently Montenegrin) is also in the middle, extremely similar to
Serbian Latin (for now the separation is not really justified, except for
political reasons, but not cultural reasons (the attempt to separate them
is made by artificially introducing neologisms that many people don't know
or use correctly, or by inventing new orthographic rules that few people
know or follow exactly; mass medias cannot really help because they are
overwhelmed by medias in other major languages, or because medias in all
these newly intriduced languages are spread over the same regions, local
medias are not powerful enough to have a decisive audience that can
influence rapidly the evolution to separate languages, and even if they
exist, they often ignore the new artificial rules. In that region, many
people belonging to distinct communities have to interchange contents
everyday; and the time were Serbocroatian was still a single language is
not very old; even if the Cyrlliic script is prefered in Serbia, it is
still not the only standard and most people also use the Latin script
easily for the same language, and translitterators are also doing good job
with only very minor differences remaining with the standard orthography of
Serbian in each script).


2015-05-13 11:24 GMT+02:00 Jonathan Rosenne :

> I have two comments:
>
> - if Hindi and Urdu are counted together, why not Italian and Portuguese?
>
> - According to a lecture some time ago by a Israel professor (I forgot his
> name), there are 80 languages actively used in Israel, including Hebrew,
> Arabic, English (both varieties), Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Ladino,
> Tagalog, most European languages, and various African and East Asian
> languages used by the large number of refugees from Africa and foreign
> workers from East Asia.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Jonathan Rosenne
>
> 054-4246522
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-boun...@unicode.org] On Behalf Of
> d...@bisharat.net
> Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2015 1:47 AM
> To: Karl Williamson; Unicode; Mark Davis ☕️; Unicode Public
> Subject: Re: FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts
>
> And a tangent, picking up on a complaint that Swahili w

RE: FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts

[Jonathan Rosenne]

I have two comments: 

- if Hindi and Urdu are counted together, why not Italian and Portuguese?

- According to a lecture some time ago by a Israel professor (I forgot his 
name), there are 80 languages actively used in Israel, including Hebrew, 
Arabic, English (both varieties), Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Ladino, Tagalog, 
most European languages, and various African and East Asian languages used by 
the large number of refugees from Africa and foreign workers from East Asia.

Best Regards,

Jonathan Rosenne

054-4246522

-Original Message-
From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-boun...@unicode.org] On Behalf Of 
d...@bisharat.net
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2015 1:47 AM
To: Karl Williamson; Unicode; Mark Davis ☕️; Unicode Public
Subject: Re: FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts

And a tangent, picking up on a complaint that Swahili wasn't represented on one 
of the 7 WaPost graphics:

http://niamey.blogspot.com/2015/05/how-many-people-speak-what-in-africa.html

Two other recent posts on this blog ("Beyond Niamey") critique the Africa part 
of a set of graphics/maps of "Second Most Spoken Languages Worldwide" (on the 
Olivet Nazarene University site) - another thought-provoking effort that could 
inform better if redone. 

Don Osborn


--Original Message--
From: Karl Williamson
Sender: Unicode
To: Mark Davis ☕️
To: Unicode Public
Subject: Re: FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts
Sent: May 12, 2015 6:19 PM

On 05/12/2015 03:05 PM, Mark Davis ☕️ wrote:
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/04/23/the-worlds-languages-in-7-maps-and-charts/
> //

And a critique:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18844

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Re: FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts

[dzo]

And a tangent, picking up on a complaint that Swahili wasn't represented on one 
of the 7 WaPost graphics:

http://niamey.blogspot.com/2015/05/how-many-people-speak-what-in-africa.html

Two other recent posts on this blog ("Beyond Niamey") critique the Africa part 
of a set of graphics/maps of "Second Most Spoken Languages Worldwide" (on the 
Olivet Nazarene University site) - another thought-provoking effort that could 
inform better if redone. 

Don Osborn


--Original Message--
From: Karl Williamson
Sender: Unicode
To: Mark Davis ☕️
To: Unicode Public
Subject: Re: FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts
Sent: May 12, 2015 6:19 PM

On 05/12/2015 03:05 PM, Mark Davis ☕️ wrote:
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/04/23/the-worlds-languages-in-7-maps-and-charts/
> //

And a critique:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18844

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Re: FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts

[Karl Williamson]

On 05/12/2015 03:05 PM, Mark Davis ☕️ wrote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/04/23/the-worlds-languages-in-7-maps-and-charts/
//


And a critique:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18844

FYI: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts

[Mark Davis ☕️]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/04/23/the-worlds-languages-in-7-maps-and-charts/