...The data doesn't support addition to this degree of accuracy because of the effect of the "others" area. Cyrillic may even overtake Arabic, because there are several countries using the Cyrillic alphabet, but not Russian or Ukrainian, which might each contribute 0.1-0.2%, but no countries as far as I know using Arabic script but not Arabic, Persian or Urdu as official languages (except perhaps Pashto in Afghanistan). Also of course the GDP data is surely not reliable to sufficient accuracy.
BTW, by summing up languages written with the same script, it is easy to derive the "immoral quotients" of writing systems:
Latin 59.13% Han 20.60% Arabic 3.82% Cyrillic 2.99% Devanagari 2.54% Hangul 1.84% Thai 0.87% Bengali 0.44% Telugu 0.42% Greek 0.40% Tamil 0.34% Gujarati 0.26%
_ Marco
Also you might get a slightly different picture if you add in the relatively prosperous users of non-western scripts who have migrated to western countries - Hebrew and Armenian as well as south Asian scripts.
As for the morality issue: while we can't do much about the relative availability of computers, it is encouraging to see that commercial software vendors as well as the open source community are making internationalisation packages and localised versions of software available, sometimes free to all and sometimes at greatly reduced cost in poorer countries. Unicode isn't going to solve inequalities on its own, but it can hardly be blamed for contributing to them. In the long term, and if other factors allow it, we might even find that the computer revolution is the key to breaking down these inequalities.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
