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Writing systems by number of users | ||
Tags: Writing System | Writing | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5403 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes  Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 1 of 22 12 May 2011 at 1:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Here's another interesting question I've been pondering about: is there any data on how
many users writing systems have? That is, how many people in the world use the Latin alphabet, how many Chinese characters, how many the Arabic abjad, and so on. Edited by Delodephius on 12 May 2011 at 1:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 2 of 22 12 May 2011 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wouldn't we have to split it down to reflect who uses X, X plus some special letters, X with these diacritics, with another set, etc?
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| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5403 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 3 of 22 12 May 2011 at 8:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I propose we don't split it down. If we for example take the Cyrillic alphabet we
wouldn't have a standard because the original Cyrillic had more letters than most modern versions of the alphabet, and each of them has a different set. It's not like the Latin alphabet which has the same set of letters for both the Latin language, English, Swahili, etc. We could note that Japanese uses a combination of different writing systems, but few languages do that(I don't know any besides Japanese). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 4 of 22 12 May 2011 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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That would simplify calculations a lot (it's practically the same as adding the whole populations of every country in -- how many groups exactly?), with the possible exception of the Sino-japanese question: does Japanese count as using Chinese characters, or doesn't it (after all, no one else uses the kana, AFAIK)?
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 5 of 22 13 May 2011 at 1:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, you would have to look at literacy rates for countries, plus literacy for different scripts/languages in any country with minority languages that use different scripts, bilingual fluency that comes with literacy in either language, countries that changed the script their official language is written in in recent history ...
mrwarper, that question is pretty easy to answer. Of course does Japanese use Chinese characters. If you can't read the a minimum of kanji, you're illiterate in Japanese as it is currently used. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 6 of 22 13 May 2011 at 7:46am | IP Logged | ||
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You could start the calculations by cross-checking these data...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_r ate and some other chart with language percentages by country, (I couldn't find one quickly). Given the numbers involved, I think Japanese is the only language that makes a difference in the big figures: if you count China + Japan as using the same writing system, it's 10% more; if you put countries in two categories (pretty much just because of Japan), the results are harder to read, etc... happy counting! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 22 13 May 2011 at 12:01pm | IP Logged | ||
It is exactly like the Latin alphabet which also has a lot of variants with different character sets (written by a Dane, whose national alphabet contains Æ Ø and Å as regular letters, and letters with tremas (ü ä ö) etc. in personal names). The Latin alphabets are just as varied as the Cyrillic ones. Edited by Iversen on 13 May 2011 at 12:02pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 8 of 22 13 May 2011 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just out of curiosity; leaving aside the whole Cyrillic thing, is it the same with the Greek alphabet as well, i.e. are there other variants with a few extra (or less) letters, diacritics, etc?
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