RE: Searching data: map countries to scripts

Richard Wordingham <richard dot wordingham at ntlworld dot com> wrote:

> As has been pointed out, you'll have to be careful what your criteria
> are, or else you'll end up with Latn wherever there's been internet
> access, Arab wherever there are Moslems, and Hebr wherever there are
> open Jews. How do you handle Classical Greek inscriptions on public
> buildings in the Western World? What about small amounts of Greek
> on crucifixes? How do you handle Chinatowns?
>
> Tourist areas can cause complications as elsewhere. Does the number of
> Japanese shop signs in Bangkok cause one to add Japanese scripts to
> Thailand? Cyrillic is making an appearance in Pattaya because of
> the Russian tourists. Tourist scripts could overwhelm the traditional,
> second scripts such as Cambodian (known as the Khom script in
> Thailand and nowadays most prominently used for tattoos and amulets,
> but previously used for Pali) and Tai Tham.

Not only that, there are problems going the other direction as well.
Thanks to the addition of Deseret and Shavian to Unicode, there are now
plenty of resources listing these two scripts alongside Latin as
"scripts used to write English." But the chances of anyone who is not a
historian or character-encoding wonk actually seeing English text
written in Deseret or Shavian (not just a code chart or character
picker) are vanishingly small.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­