Re: Suggestion

[Kenneth Rohde Christiansen <kenneth gnu org>]

Actually the way we mostly use in linguistics is to write the countries
where the language is spoken. Then how many people that lives there and
how many percent who understands the language, how many percent who
speaks the language, how many percent that are able to read it, and how
many percent that are able to write it. This is done for all countries
where the language is spoken. Precise numbers are not used for speakers
etc - only the amount of people in the country - for the rest
percentages are used.

Cheers, Kenneth

On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 21:13, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Noah Levitt <nlevitt@columbia.edu> writes:
> 
> > Good point. There are also native speakers of Chinese
> > dialects in several other countries, like Singapore,
> > Vietnam, etc. IIRC, most native speakers from outside the
> > People's Republic use Traditional writing . Maybe we should
> > round up to 40 million. So I propose:
> > 
> >   zh_CN: 1.2 billion
> >   zh_TW: 40 million
> > 
> > Funda, http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html
> > says
> > 
> >   Population: 1,286,975,468 (July 2003 est.)
> > 
> > And not all of these are native speakers of languages that
> > are written in Simplified Chinese (Tibetans, Inner
> > Mongolians, etc), which is why I suggest rounding down to
> > 1.2 billion.
> 
> If we want to get really accurate about language choices here, we need
> to take literacy rates into account.  China seems to have an adult
> literacy rate of ~85%[1], though that's defined by very basic reading
> skills.  It's possible that some of the vocabulary in GNOME might
> require a higher reading comprehension level than that.
> 
> Thanks,
> -Jonathan "I can't believe I'm jumping into this thread" Blandford
> 
> [1] http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/indicator/indic_2_1_1.html
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-- 
Kenneth Rohde Christiansen <kenneth@gnu.org>