Last speaker of Bo died

[Benjamin Barrett]

On Feb 16, 2010, at 6:43 AM, Marion Gunn wrote:

> Scríobh Benjamin Barrett:
>> It seems surprising to me that the Unicode Consortium would keep this sort of data. Some time ago, didn't they decide they were going to stop issuing characters with diacritics, leaving it up to software writers to find a way to deal with them?
> 
> Both questions you would have to put to Unicode directly, Benjamin, as I have done, or to your local US Congressman/woman, who must know how to access such information for you.

From http://unicode.org/pending/proposals.html
The Unicode Consortium is interested in obtaining information on known glyphs, minor variants, precomposed characters (including ligatures, conjunct consonants, and accented characters) and other such "non-characters," mainly for cataloging and research purposes; however, they are generally not acceptable for character proposals.

From http://www.unicode.org/standard/supported.html
The Unicode Character Standard primarily encodes scripts rather than languages.

>> 
>> Another approach is to go to
>> 
>> http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=Americas
>> 
>> There is a lot of overlap, though, which would make it difficult. There doesn't seem to be a way to simply grab all of the languages found in the region.
> Yes, a simple way to "grab all of the languages found in the region" covered by US law, which, like other countries must have an inventory of its own indigenous languages, don't you think?

Unfortunately, I do not. To give one example, the US had a policy until only a couple decades ago of eliminating Native American languages, and while that has been reversed, I doubt that the tribes recognized by the US government match the languages spoken. In my own city of Seattle, for example, the Duwamish people have yet to be recognized by the US government (they lost recognition when a federal official missed the deadline by about 24 hours), which is yet another problem in trying to identify languages. The past US policy of dishonest treaty-making (and breaking) means that there is not a simple correspondence of recognized peoples/languages. Moreover, it can be difficult to ascertain whether a language is still alive; many people have developed metrics, but it is a bear of a task trying to understand whether a language is being spoken in full or reduced form.

As another example, Mexico has probably the second-largest inventories of languages in the world, but I doubt that their government spends a lot of time tallying languages, weeding through the mass number of dialects and languages to try and identify each. (Moreover, I would not trust a government count of languages.)

The Ethnologue is surely the best resource for this sort of thing.

BB

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