Thanks John. You reminded me why we dropped the "except Israel" from the
"Middle East" entry for Arabic.

Since Arabic is an official (even if qualified) language for Israel, (Arabs are
close to 20% of the population) it wasn't right to say Arabic is used in the
middle east "except Israel".

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/is.html
tex

John Cowan wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
> www.egroups.com/group/qalam - world's writing systems.
> To unsubscribe: qalam-unsubscribe@egroups.com
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

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