Lars Marius Garshol wrote:

>
> * Peter T. Daniels
> |
> | The counter would have to give the arbitrary definition of what s/he
> | chose to count, since boundaries between script variants are as
> | strict as they are between language variants.
>
> That's true, and this is one hurdle to an objective count that I don't
> really think is surmountable. I've made some choices in my database,
> but I'm well aware that these are if not exactly arbitrary, then at
> least highly questionable.

Nu, what are your criteria?

> However, I still think asking the question and trying to answer it is
> interesting, since it does actually tell us something. If the number
> of scripts is in the range of 200, which I think is fair to assume,
> it's immediately obvious that there is an enormous difference in the
> number of scripts and the number of languages. Which, IMHO, is quite
> interesting.

The vast majority of languages have never had writing, let alone scripts
of their own. What's the point?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...