Re: for next release notes

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh farsiweb info>]

On Tue, 2004-10-12 at 15:48, Luis Villa wrote:
> http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/help/top-100-languages-by-population.html
> 
> I don't know if you guys/gals have found this, but I remember last time
> we worked up release notes, we were looking for this kind of
> information, so I thought I'd email it to the list so that we can find
> it in the archives next time we need it :)

Problems:

(1) Ethnologue is about native *speak*ers. It's not about how many
people *read* the language. For example, when you add Persian support to
GNOME, you will have the whole literate population of Iran by your side,
since Persian is the only official language and literacy means reading
it. But when you just count native speakers of "Persian", they're only
half of the country.

(2) Ethnologue is not a reliable source for differentiating languages
the way ISO codes do that. For example, the language I translate for,
Persian, with the ISO code of "fa", is "FARSI, WESTERN"+"FARSI,
EASTERN"+lots of more entries not listed on the Top 107 thing.

(3) Ethnologue is not a reliable source for the number of speakers of
languages, specially when we want to find about minority languages or
more obscure areas. I found that very important when I was doing some
language research in Afghanistan.

(4) The list is from 1996.

There are probably more reasons, but I guess those are enough to dismiss
it.

roozbeh