RE: Searching data: map countries to scripts

A side remark: Europe also writes Greek.

Sincerely, Erkki

-----Alkuperäinen viesti-----
Lähettäjä: unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org] Puolesta David Starner
Lähetetty: 21. elokuuta 2012 2:53
Vastaanottaja: Unicode Mailing List
Aihe: 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".

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