On 01.03.2018 06:33, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote:
2018-02-28 14:22 GMT+01:00 Christoph Päper via
Unicode <unicode@unicode.org [1]>:
There are approximately 7,000 living human languages,
but fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on
computers,
mobile phones, and other devices.
Fewer than 100 languages is a bit small, I can count nearly about 200
languages well supported with all the necessary basic support to
develop them with content. The limitation however is elsewhere: in
education and litteracy level for these languages so that people
start
using them as well on the web and in other medias or use them more
easily in their daily life and improve the quality and coverage of
data available in these languages. This includes developing an
orthography (many languages dont have any developed and supported
orthography, even if there was attempts to create dictionnaries,
including online with Wikitionary).
With the encoded scripts, you can already type and view correctly
thousands of languages. This these languages are living, it should
not
be difficult to support most of them with the existing scripts that
are already encoded (weve reched the point where we only have to
encode historic scripts, to preserve the cultures or languages that
have disappeared or are dying fast since the begining of the 20th
century). Even if major languages will persist and regional languages
will die, this should not be done without reintegrating in those
major
languages some significant parts of the past regional cultures, which
can still become sources for enriching these major languages so that
they become more precise and more useful and allow then easier access
to past regional languages, possibly then directly in their original
script, with people then able to decipher them or being interested to
study them. Past languages and preserved texts will then remain as a
rich source for keeping existing languages alive, vivid, productive
for new terms, without having to necessarily borrow terms from less
than 20 large "international" languages (ar, de, en, es, fa, fr, nl,
id, ja, ko, pt, ru, hi, zh), written in only 6 well developed scripts
(Arab, Latn, Cyrl, Deva, Hang, Hans, Jpan).
Pen, or brush and paper is much more flexible. With thousands of names
of people and places still not encoded I am not sure if I would describe
hans (simplified Chinese characters) as well supported. nor with current
policy which limits China with over one billion people to submitting
less than 500 Chinese characters a year on average, and names not being
all to be added, it is hard to say which decade hans will be well
supported.
John Knightley
Links:
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[1] mailto:unicode@unicode.org
