Languages

Languages

$Mathematics$

I am trying to arrange the relation between language families, languages and countries in several tables briefly. I couldn't fill all cell of the table. Factors that makes the arrangement difficult are that

There are many languages. (10³~10⁴ maybe)
Languages are dispersed like mosaic. According to historical circumstances, distribution of languages does not correspond with that of countries, areas, races, or religions.
Physically and economically it takes much time to master foreign languages, especially heterogeneous ones. Therefore progress of study can upset the established theory.
Languages are fluid. A language may never dawn but be able to discover. Keeping pace with the times or encountering foreign cultures, a language changes, sometimes splits, absorbs or is absorbed by another one. Reduction or extinction of speakers causes decline or disappearance of the language, and the revival is almost impossible. Once vanished, even if characters are left, decipher is not always possible, and if no character or nothing remains, there is no clue.
Every language gives names to its foreign languages. Even in one language, according to the researcher's hearing, there are several spelling and pronunciation for a foreign language.

easy are that

Everyone recognizes that a language is indispensable to life, so any language interests people culturally, religiously, politically and economically.
A way of traveling or communication has been developed, and recently the Internet makes it possible to communicate without direct contacts. Actually many persons go abroad for business or sightseeing, and they upload the latest information of the world.

→ 1 →

↓
2
↓

いろはにほへど　ちりぬるを

わがよたれぞ　　つねならむ

うゐのおくやま　けふこえて

あさきゆめみじ　ゑひもせず

A Japanese syllabary

→ 1 →

↓
2
↓

イロハニホヘド　チリヌルヲ

ワガヨタレゾ　　ツネナラム

ウヰノオクヤマ　ケフコエテ

アサキユメミジ　ヱヒモセズ

A square phonetic Japanese syllabary

← 2 ←

浅	有	我	色
き	為	が	は
夢	の	世	匂
見	奥	誰	へ
じ	山	ぞ	ど

酔	今	常	散
ひ	日	な	り
も	越	ら	ぬ
せ	え	む	る
ず	て		を

↓
1
↓

A mixture of Chinese & Japanese


 i ro ha ni ho he  to - chi ri nu ru  o
wa ka yo ta re so     - tsu ne na ra mu
 u  i no  o ku ya  ma -  ke fu ko  e te
 a sa ki yu me mi shi -   e hi mo se su

I referred to the following sites.

Language
Ethnologue	covers more than 6700 languages over 200 countries. country / language family / language / language code / site search
SIL International	is formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet	: English and Japanese. For each of the Languages of the World, this home page describes its brief history, features, writing system, and character set and keyboard for computers and the Internet processing.
Open Directory Project	: There are world languages' samples.
The Rosetta Project	is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone. They say that fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, ...
Character
Written characters of the world	: Japanese only. More than 28 daily papers in the world and 89 historical characters are on display. cf. Akira Nakanishi, Writing Systems of World: Alphabets, Syllabaries, Pictograms (Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc. 1989)
Unicode Home Page	shows the shape of various characters in the PDF documents. Click ``Code Charts.''
Writing Systems	explains alphabetic, syllabic and logographic writing systems, includes more than 100 alphabets. The author is a web developer lived in England.
Ancient Scripts	introduces more than 40 ancient characters (dead or alive). The author is a computer engineer.
Dictionary
yourDictionary.com	provides the most comprehensive and authoritative portal for language and language-related products and services on the web with more than 1800 dictionaries with more than 250 languages.
Foreignword	is a language technology company constituted in mid 2000.
International
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan	: Diplomatic relations between Japan and other countries.
CIA -- The World Factbook	: Introduction, Geography, People, Government, Economy, Communications, Transportation, Military, Transnational Issues.
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection	is a general collection of more than 250,000 maps covering all areas of the world. Many of the maps are included in their online catalog, UTNetCAT. More than 5,000 map images from their collection are also available online. Most of the maps scanned by the General Libraries and served from this web site are in the public domain.
World Press Review	is the journal of record for an influential global audience, providing an unprecedented platform for ideas and opinions on topics of significant international concern.
Code
The Library of Congress	lists language codes. (alpha-2, alpha-3, English and French)
The Unicode Consortium	lists language codes. (ISO, Microsoft and Macintosh)
Babel (an Alis Technologies / Internet Society joint project)	lists language codes in various languages.
ISO (International Organization for Standardization)	lists country codes (ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 code elements).
ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)	lists domain names. IANA (The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) creates new ccTLDs (country-code top-level domains) only when they are listed on the ISO 3166-1 list.

Updated on 2003.1.24

First edition : 2001.12.25