Re: [idn] Re: language scripts classified

[John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com>]

I suggest that most of your category #5 should also be moved to
#1.  Regardless of the population, these are contemporary,
spoken, languages.  Also, separating #2 from other categories
is, while factual, not useful.  Most or all of these are the
_primary_ languages of some groups: the fact that members of
those populations also speak "something else" is no more
relevant  than the fact that you speak English is to the
legitimacy of Korean.  

In addition, linguistic boundaries are, for better or worse,
different from political ones.  Both tend to shift.  If we make
decisions based on a mapping between political and linguistic
boundaries (which is what #2 implies), we will certainly find
ourselves, over time, getting it wrong.

Finally, if we really want to internationalize the system, we
had best not try to do so on the basis of population counts.
Doing so leads to forms of discrimination that are
uncomfortable, at best.  And it is not clear that the small
number of people who might want to do so is a good argument
against prohibiting naming hosts in, e.g., Runic.

    john


--On Wednesday, 18 July, 2001 11:17 +0900 Soobok Lee
<lsb@postel.co.kr> wrote:

> Some corrections.
> someone suggests that these two should be moved to #1.
> These are modern scripts used by some minorities. sorry.
> 
> Syriac: only used for for liturgical purpose 
> Unified Canadian ABoriginal Syllables:  
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: Soobok Lee 
> To: idn@ops.ietf.org 
> Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2001 9:28 AM
> Subject: language scripts classified
> 
> 
> While gathering  usage frequency data for many language
> scripts, I classified them into 6 categories (see enclosed ):
> 
>   Will all of these scripts  be frequently  used in IDN ?
>   At least #3 archaic scripts and #4 won't and 
>   for #1 and #2 , i am neutral yet.
>   I am working on #5.
> 
> I can find many similarities and ambiguities across these
> language scripts. Many Indian language scripts came from the
> same mother language  'Brahmi' and have  similarly-looking
> scripts and numerals .
> 
>  see http://www.omniglot.com/writing/yi.htm
> 
> 
> Soobok Lee 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------
> 
># 0  already in ML.com testbed  (I got huge usage frequency
># samples for these)
> Hebrew:
> Arabic:
> Thai:
> Hindi(Devanagari):
> Cyrillic:
> Greek:
> Hiragana:
> Katakana:
> Hangul:
> Han Ideograph:
> 
> 
># 1 few native speakers
> 
> Georgian: < 3.5 millions
> Cherokee:  100,000 (North America)
> Thaana  :  100,000 (Maldives)
> Armenian:   2 millions
> 
> 
># 2 two languages in one country:
> 
> bengali: Indian language ( > 180 millions )
> gujarati: Indian language  
> gurmukhi: Indian language
> kannada: Indian language
> malayalam: Indian language
> oriya: Indian language
> telugu: Indian language
> 
> tibetan : chinese (mainland china)   , < 5 milliions
> yi syllables: chinese (mainland china), < 5 millions
> 
> 
># 3 Archaic
> Ogham: 
> Runic:
> Gothic:
> Syriac: only used for for liturgical purpose 
> Unified Canadian ABoriginal Syllables:
> 
> 
># 4 Written only vertically
> mongolian:  (once had been abolished and restored)
> 
> 
># 5  others
> 
> sinhala : Sri lanka
> tamil : Sri lanka
> khmer : Camobodian
> lao  : Laos, Thai
> ethiopic : Ethiopia
> myanmar : Burmese
> 
> 
> 
>