A side remark: Europe also writes Greek.

Sincerely, Erkki

-----Alkuperäinen viesti-----
Lähettäjä: unicode-bou...@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bou...@unicode.org] 
Puolesta David Starner
Lähetetty: 21. elokuuta 2012 2:53
Vastaanottaja: Unicode Mailing List
Aihe: Re: Searching data: map countries to scripts

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Ed Trager <ed.tra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> IMO, mapping scripts at the level of whole countries is, for many if 
> not most countries, too crude.  In India --one example among many we 
> could name-- it would be much more informative to map at at least the 
> level of states and territories.

Depends on what level of crudeness you're willing to accept. India, China, 
perhaps some nations in SE Asia and some in Africa might be considered 
multiscript, but Russia, which was mentioned in the first message, has Cyrillic 
as the official script and no language spoken by 1% of the populace is normally 
written in a script other than Cyrillic. There's no script in all the Americas 
that touches Latin; I believe Chinese is the second largest. Europe writes 
Latin or Cyrillic, and the line between the two is pretty sharp. I think the 
majority of African nations can accurately be described as Arabic users or 
Latin users, though it might be a slim majority.

To state that 97% of the people in a country use a script is not too crude for 
most purposes, and I think most nations hit that line. For most purposes, the 
other answer is "send a whole multilingual system to every country".

--
Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.



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