From: Tex Texin
Message: 1689
Date: 2003-09-15
>--
> 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
>
>
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