From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Thu Mar 24 2005 - 16:04:59 CST
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
On
> Behalf Of N.R.Liwal
> I wonder weather a discussion that I would like to initiate might have
> been
> already discussed on this forum...
Several of your questions would be more appropriately asked on the
Endangered Languages list. I don't have the details handy at the moment;
you can try searching.
I won't duplicate answers Rick has provided.
> How many languages are written in the world today?
Depends on how you measure. One measure is that there have been portions
of the Bible translated and published in over 2000 languages. But that
doesn't mean that the orthographies devised in all those cases have
stuck and that the communities have become literate -- that would be a
different measure. Very often, you have *parts* of the overall community
becoming literate -- but how many within a community need to become
literate in the language before you start saying the language is
written? 1? 100? 1000? And what about how much those people read/write
and for what purposes?
In short, there is no definitive answer to this question.
> How many languages are endangered?
A very large number. See http://www.sil.org/sociolx/ndg-lg-home.html for
some answers to your questions.
Peter Constable
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