Subject: Re: [lojban] Oblique Strategies

From: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 23:04:51 -0400

John Cowan writes:
>	After a little research, I discovered that the half- dozen most
>	widely spoken languages, together, were known to more than half
>	of the world's population. (It's interesting to try to guess
>	what these languages are; the mistakes in our guessing tell us a
>	lot about our cultural and geographic myopia. The top half-dozen
>	languages: Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian
>	and Arabic. Among people I've talked to, most of their missed
>	guesses appear in the second half-dozen: Japanese, French,
>	German, Portuguese, Bengali, and Malay. Score six for Europe,
>	five for Asia -- including two in India; and Malay which almost
>	no Westerner would guess -- and one for Arabia. None for highly
>	balkanized Africa.) 
>
>It seems to me that the source of this listing has to be Lojban,
>since the exact order of languages depends on what your source is
and how you count 2nd-language speakers (we reckon them as half
>a speaker). The grouping into Top Six and Second Six is also
>plainly Lojbanic: TLI Loglan has a Top Eight instead.

Interesting. I dug a bit myself, and found that the Ethnologue has a
_very_ different order: http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/top100.html. I
can't find the site I used to use, which was much more nicely laid out.

-Robin

-- 
http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest.
Despite not getting very emotional about it, the fact that quantum
entanglement doesn't allow transmission of information is probably the
most profound dissapointment I've ever experienced. -- RLPowell