Edward wrote:
>Fascinating thought. How many ethnic groups are there with
written languages? I remember when The Book of a Thousand
Tongues (Bible Society, London, 1972 IIRC, out of print) came
out, and I hear that there is a Book of Two Thousand Tongues in
the works. I also heard about a long-range plan involving SIL
to create writing systems for the rest of the 6,000-odd
languages listed by Ethnologue sometime before hundreds of them
go extinct.
>How are we doing? Who works on creating writing systems? How
many new characters are we likely to need that can't be handled
with composition?
I'm not aware of any long-range plan on the part of SIL that I
would describe in the terms you did. It suggests that we'd be
setting e.g. a hundred people to sit down and crank out
orthographies. We do not just make orthography decisions
unilaterally. Things are far more complicated than that.
Orthography development requires a good phonological analysis
of the particular language, an even better understanding of the
sociolinguistic and politicolinguistic factors at play in the
particular context, and strong interaction with the user
community - they need to own decisions (where governments are
not doing that), and we need to be there as consultants. It
also needs to be done in the context of a program for
establishing viable literacy. In some cases, a community may
simply not be interested in literacy, in which case we can do
at most preliminary work, but no established writing system
results.
In addition to a count of languages in the Ethnologue, I have
access to some statistics regarding Bible translation
(something we try to keep track of) that don't talk exactly
about # of languages with writing systems, but are suggestive
of how many languages have writing systems:
# of living languages (current Ethnologue count): 6809
Bible translation needs:
Definite need: 914
Definite need but work is on hold: 3
Probable need: 270
Possible need: 2250
Unlikely need: 175
Reported bilingual: 246
Nearly extinct: 413
Need revision or new translation: 51
Bible: 333
NT: 876
In progress: 1278
I divided the BT needs statistics into two parts: the first
part are those that likely *don't* have writing systems
(#=4271); the second part represent those languages that would
probably already have writing systems (#=2538), though some of
these may no longer be viable languages.
These are rough estimates only. An exact amount would be much
harder to work out. E.g. for how many languages did someone
translate all or some of the Bible where literacy never got
established, or where there was a tradition of literacy that
has not continued? (E.g. Northern Thai had an established
tradition of literacy, and the Lanna script was adopted for
neighboring language groups, such as Tai Lue, over which they
had influence, but literacy in N. Thai began to die off as
government schools teaching Siamese became establish in N.
Thailand in the earlier part of this century. Today, only a
very small portion of N. Thais can read Lanna script, though
the Tai Lue writing system based on Lanna script is still very
viable, even though the government in PRC introduced a new
writing system - New Tai Lue script - in the 1950s.) There are
also situations in which several writing systems may have been
developed but none has become established; it may not be easy
to determine in some such cases whether to count that language
among the "already have"s or the "don't yet have"s.
Peter
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