> From: William T Goodall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > on 23/4/02 4:24 pm, The Fool at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > > >> From: Russell Chapman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > >> William T Goodall wrote: > >> > >>> Now consider that Korea (AFAIK) has the highest penetration of > > broadband > >>> internet in the world, that Chinese ideographs are the most common > > written > >>> language etc and it seems likely that in a few years most spam (and > > most of > >>> the www for that matter) will be in ideographs rather than English. > >>> > >> I think that's personal/domestic penetration. US companies still pour > > an > >> awful lot of stuff onto the net through some fairly big pipes. And I > >> think that those same high bandwidth users in Korea have a fairly high > >> proportion of English speakers among them. > >> > >> Regardless, I think English will remain the > >> dominant language on the net for a while yet. > > > > If only because keyboards are great for the 60 some characters used by > > latin based languages, instead of the 6000 - 12000 required in some > > oriental languages. Besides English is the lingua franca. > > > > See > > http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176049.html > > The story gives these figures for the current top 5 countries for numbers of > users with home internet access: > > 1 USA 166 million > 2 China 56.6 million > 3 Japan 51.3 million > 4 Germany 32.2 million > 5 UK 29 million > > And predicts the Chinese figure could be 257 million in three or four years.
I'll see your newsbytes and raise you a C|net from yesterday: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-888246.html " But until more Chinese households have telephone lines and can see more online content they like, penetration rates could remain low, according to the research firm. " " Only 35.6 percent of homes in China have telephones, and few Internet sites have developed good Chinese content, he said. "Content in English or in Japanese is much more common. If you surf the Net (in Chinese), you see a lot of the same stuff over and over again," Yu said. "There's a feeling that there's nothing fresh out there." " Did ya see that bit where most of the content is english/japaneese? And it doesn't address the issue, of keyboards which was my primary point. When you have to Know a minumum of 3000 characters to be considered literate, the complexity of creating content with a keyboard is an exceptionally difficult process for the average person. With latin based languages, it is far less difficult for the average person to create content, like a letter.
