From: Stefan Persson (alsjebegrijptwatikbedoel@yahoo.se)
Date: Wed Oct 22 2003 - 12:47:40 CST
Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 22/10/2003 02:17, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>
>> ...
>>
>> 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%
>
> The data doesn't support addition to this degree of accuracy because
> of the effect of the "others" area. Cyrillic may even overtake Arabic,
> because there are several countries using the Cyrillic alphabet, but
> not Russian or Ukrainian, which might each contribute 0.1-0.2%, but no
> countries as far as I know using Arabic script but not Arabic, Persian
> or Urdu as official languages (except perhaps Pashto in Afghanistan).
> Also of course the GDP data is surely not reliable to sufficient
> accuracy.
Don't forget to take in account that Latin and Greek letters are used in
most languages, e.g. as part of mathematical formulæ.
Stefan
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