From: Christopher Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Tue Jul 13 2004 - 12:05:52 CDT
E. Keown wrote:
> Last year an SIL script expert told me that 50-60% of
> the world's languages are *still* unwritten (that's
> 3600-4200 unwritten languages). SIL hopes to build
> writing systems for everything by 2020....
> And the phonetics people say that the world's
> languages contain 1200 different sounds---900
> different consonants, 300 different vowels.
> I think that implies that Unicode Latin will be
> different *every* year between now and 2020....
I doubt whether there is a need to distinguish between
900 different consonants and 300 different vowels in
everyday writing. For the most part I expect that any,
as yet unwritten, language that adopts the Roman script
will use combinations of existing Latin letters
and combining diacritics.
Anyway no more composite Latin characters will get encoded
so there are unlikely to be many additions to Latin script
in Unicode.
- Chris
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