[Foundation-l] A simple question on languages.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 23, 2008 11:14 AM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 23, 2008 11:08 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What is the minimum number of languages must you write in to
> > effectively communicate with 99.9999% of all the world's literate
> > people?
>
> Just on a note of clarification, are we talking about the effective
> communication of our websites? That is, do we exclude from this people
> who don't have computer access? Also, since we are a print medium, do
> we exclude people who do not have a written form of language (ignoring
> transliterations which are used academically, but are not used to
> communicate between speakers of that language)?
>
> I'm pretty sure I know the answers to some of these questions, but I
> want to make sure.

I was looking for more generally than our website, but specifically
enough to match written communication (literate people).

I think it would be reasonable to classify a person who can
comfortably communicat *only* in languages without a written form as
illiterate and, in any case, I suspect that the total number of such
people fall below the rather arbitrary five-nines threshold that I
provided.

If we include computer access, then I expect that doing so would
exclude so many people that it would dwarf the numbers excluded due to
the inability to use some language(s).  Though the numbers may still
be interesting.    Even excluding illiterate people excludes  a much
larger number that I would expect would be excluded by not also
offering the least popular languages.