Marco Cimarosti scripsit:

> Bengali has probably as many speakers as English or Mandarin;

The Ethnologue's estimates for first-language speakers:

Mandarin: 875 million
English: 341 million
Bengali: 207 million
Hindi: 366 million
Urdu: 104 million

> Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, and other languages have more or less as many
> speakers as German, French or Italian.

Tamil: 74 million
Telugu: 70 million
Panjabi: 45 million (Western) + 27 million (Eastern) = 72 million
German: 100 million
French: 77 million
Italian: 62 million

Western and Eastern Panjabi have different foci, but there is a
dialect continuum; on the other hand, Eastern Panjabi has a dialect
continuum with Hindi, too.

> | Middle East; Arabic; RTL; Arabic
>
> You might wish to write "Middle East, except Israel". But perhaps this is
> unnecessary as, AFAIK, Arabic is the second official language of Israel.

The CIA Factbook says that Israeli Arabic is official only if you are
an Arab, so I take it that you (e.g.) can't go there, write letters to
the government in Arabic, and have a right to get answers.

--
John Cowan jcowan@...
"You need a change: try Canada" "You need a change: try China"
--fortune cookies opened by a couple that I know