Tex Texin wrote:

> OK, I am ready for another round of abuse. The next draft of
> the Q&A for
> "which languages are RTL?" is here:
>
> http://www.i18nguy.com/temp/W3C%20I18N%20Q&A%20Which%20languag
> es%20are%20right-to-left.html
>
> I would be glad for your comments, and in particular your
> review of the
> languages and scripts listed, and suggestions for others.
>
> Note reference to "bidi" is removed!

In addition to what Richard already said:

- "Classical Syriac", "Modern Syriac" and "Syriac" are all one and the same
script, by the point of view of information technology. I suspect which a
pair of these can be seen as the same script also by the point of view of
grammatology.

- AFAIK, "Indonesian" is not a script. Have you perhaps swapped the Script
and Language columns on this row?

- AFAIK, there is no computer character set for N'ko. Therefore, it is
unlikely that a designer is asked to design a page in this language.

- The South Arabian script is extinct, as probably are the languages which
where written with it: Hadhramautic, Himyaritic, Qatabanic, and Sabaic. I am
quite confident that Sabaic is extinct.

- Ladino/Judezmo is most often written in the Latin alphabet, especially on
a web page. Consider that the biggest Ladino communities are in Turkey and
in the two Americas, where the Latin script is normally used. I don't know
whether Ladinos in Israel also use the Hebrew script, but I have seen many
Israeli pages about folklore where Ladino songs where only in Latin scripts.

- The term "Ideographic languages" suffers of about the same problems as the
term "bidi languages". Perhaps even more, as the term "ideograph(ic)" per se
is debatable. A better term is "CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)",
which is quite likely to be familiar to anyone involved in
internationalization.

But you should perhaps add information for *all* the script in Unicode and
the main languages written with them. It may be less than obvious that, say,
Marathi is written in the Devanagari script, and that Devanagari is written
LTR.


<SUGGESTION value=$0.02>

If you want to give comprehensive information, it'd perhaps be better to
rearrange completely the information in two separate tables, the first one
mapping languages to script(s), and the second one mapping scripts to
directionality:

Languages table:

Language: Script(s): Notes:
... ... ...
Croatian Latin Cmp. Serbian
... ... ...
Ladino Latin, Hebrew Also known as "Judezmo" or "Judeo-Spanish"
... ... ...
Serbian Cyrillic, Latin Cmp. Croatian
... ... ...

Scripts table:

Script: Dir: Notes:
... ... ...
Cyrillic LTR
... ... ...
Hebrew RTL
... ... ...
Latin LTR Also known as "Roman"
... ... ...

A first draft selection of languages for table 1 could all the languages
having a two-letter code in ISO 639
(http://lcweb.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/englangn.html). Note that, e.g.,
Ladino would not be included.

Finding out which script(s) are used for each languages could be an
interesting trivia game for the members of this mailing list. :-)

</SUGGESTION>


_ Marco