On May 10, 2007, at 7:44 PM, Zefram wrote:
Benjamin Schultz wrote:
I like this phrasing. Any comments, Zefram, on the phrase "widely
spoken Human language"?
It's woolly. Pick a specific minimum number of native speakers and
then we'll be getting into feasible territory. Wikipedia lists 35
languages with more than 30 million native speakers, which already
makes it a time-consuming research project, so I suggest picking a
much
higher number. There's still the problem of varying transliterations
into Latin script (the most popular language is Mandarin, of course),
but transliterations are fairly well established for the very popular
languages and there are a limited number of popular transliterations.
I'd be willing to limit it to the top 100 languages listed on
Wikipedia, but that rules out Danish and Finnish at 101 and 102
respectively. The list also explicitly says it counts major dialects
separately.
You also still need to decide which senses of the English word "bear"
you want to translate.
-zefram
As a noun, as a four-footed mammal typically seen in woodland terrain
and with a literary propensity for hunny.
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Benjamin Schultz KE3OM
OscarMeyr
