Re: Searching data: map countries to scripts

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Ed Trager <ed.trager_at_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.