[Foundation-l] A simple question on languages.

Sat Jan 26 11:57:55 UTC 2008

> 2a) What proportion of the world's literate population can read one of
> the six official languages of the United Nations (ar, en, es, fr, ru,
> zh)?
> 2b) What proportion of the world's literate population can read one of
> ar, de, en, es, fr, pt, ru, zh?
> 2c-f) What proportion of the world's literate population can read one
> of a list of [15, 30, 100, 200] languages chosen so as to maximize the
> answer to this question?
>
>
> These seem like even simpler questions (except the last part of 2,
> which has a difficult optimization problem contained in it).  I hope
> someone can answer them.
>

You probably need to specify what do you mean by "can read". Say in
Wikipedia Babel language proficiency level terms, if somebody "can read"
English - do you require for the question 2 en-1, en-2, or en-3 level?

My guess would be that with en-3 to a good approximation it is the same
percentage as calculated from the number of native speakers of these
languages; for en-2 and en-1 it could make a difference.

Cheers,
Yaroslav