On 22/10/2003 02:17, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
...
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%
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.
Don't forget to take in account that Latin and Greek letters are used in most languages, e.g. as part of mathematical formulæ.
Stefan
