Re: Interesting Brain/Language Nugget of Info

Patrick Dunn wrote:

> Hebrew isn't widely used?  What exactly do you mean by "widely used"?
Perhaps five million people speak Hebrew, of whom most are literate.
Arabic is one of the six or seven largest human languages,
with more than 150 million speakers, though many speakers are illiterate.
Furthermore, the Arabic script is used by at least a dozen other
languages; the Quran, written in Arabic, has gone wherever Islam has gone.

> And what, in fact, is the Unicode Roadmap?
The current plan for incorporating scripts into Unicode.  A graphical
version of it is at
http://www.indigo.ie/egt/standards/iso10646/bmp-roadmap-table.html ;
the current allocations (Unicode 3.0) are at
http://www.indigo.ie/egt/standards/iso10646/bmp-today-table.html .
Unicode 3.0 is in beta now, but the character allocations are
irrevocably fixed.

The other RTL scripts are:

        Syriac (basically ecclesiastical use)
        Thaana (used for Divehi, the national language of the Maldives)

which are in Unicode 3.0, and

        Phoenician (obsolete)
        Avestan (obsolete/ecclesiastical)
        Aramaic (obsolete)
        Tifinagh (for Berber languages)
        Samaritan (obsolete)

which are not.  There are also various other RTL scripts in the
Plane 1 Roadmap, all obsolete, which aren't ready to be taken up
by the relevant committees yet.

> The ink vs. chisel story sounds nice, and all, but it hardly holds up.
> Runic alphabets, designed to be carved into stone, are usually (not
> exclusively) read LTR.
Good point.

> And hebrew, as far as I know, has been written with
> ink for a loooong time.
Certainly.  And Britain and some of its (ex-)colonies have been driving
on the left for a long time, and seem unlikely to switch.  But it's
a minority habit nonetheless, a fact which needs explaining.

> Of course, making a decision might be tricky; we have only a small sample
> size, and unfortunately many vowelless writing systems come from the same
> family of languages, so proving causality might be tricky.
Indeed.

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
        You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
        You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
                Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)