Re: Searching data: map countries to scripts

David Starner, Mon, 20 Aug 2012 16:52:44 -0700:
> 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.

To be more fine grained then, for Russia, India and Chine, it would be
possible to go down on the level of "federal subjects".

Manuel Strehl, Mon, 20 Aug 2012 01:05:54 +0200:
> For example, Russia has only Cyrl associated, while, as far as I can
> tell, at least Latn and Arab should also be mentioned, also perhaps some
> historic scripts.

For Russia, then I believe the situation to be like so: Cyrillic script
(Cyrl) is used for all languages that can be considered native to
Russia: Russian, Tatar, some Finno-Ugric languages and so on. Whereas
foreign languages, such as Georgian, Armenian and English (!), use
their usual scripts. The fact that the populations of some of the
native non-Russian languages are more open to mixing in Latin (and
perhaps Arabic, in moslem areas), does not alter that picture. For
instance, I don't think there is much more reason to mention Arabic
script than there is reason to mention the Church Slavonic script. (The
latter has its own code, Cyrs, in the language subtag registry, and can
be found in liturgic books.)

From a locale point of view (that is: from a computerization point of
view), then I think it is more important to stress that Cyrillic is
used everywhere in Russia (for all Russian Federation native
languages), than it is to go in detail about the small variations.

-- 
leif halvard silli