Re: Suggestion

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Noah Levitt <nlevitt@columbia.edu> writes:

> Good point. There are also native speakers of Chinese
> dialects in several other countries, like Singapore,
> Vietnam, etc. IIRC, most native speakers from outside the
> People's Republic use Traditional writing . Maybe we should
> round up to 40 million. So I propose:
> 
>   zh_CN: 1.2 billion
>   zh_TW: 40 million
> 
> Funda, http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html
> says
> 
>   Population: 1,286,975,468 (July 2003 est.)
> 
> And not all of these are native speakers of languages that
> are written in Simplified Chinese (Tibetans, Inner
> Mongolians, etc), which is why I suggest rounding down to
> 1.2 billion.

If we want to get really accurate about language choices here, we need
to take literacy rates into account.  China seems to have an adult
literacy rate of ~85%[1], though that's defined by very basic reading
skills.  It's possible that some of the vocabulary in GNOME might
require a higher reading comprehension level than that.

Thanks,
-Jonathan "I can't believe I'm jumping into this thread" Blandford

[1] http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/indicator/indic_2_1_1.html