This CS thread got me wondering: How many different alphabets are currently in use, in the whole world? (if it is known exactly, and if not, what prevents it from being known?)
Are you interested in the number of alphabets or the number of writing systems in use?
Here’s a link to Omniglot. That’s a good place to start.
I see this is going to be much more complicated than I previously imagined! I hope I’m not in over my head. From that link, it sounds like I’m wondering about writing systems, since I had included abjads (?) Hebrew and Arabic in what I termed “alphabets”. Some of those syllabic alphabets are really beautiful.
Maybe I can revise my question: How many different kinds of writing systems are in use and how are they distributed over the world? Are alphabets even dominant?
That’s a pretty interesting site, but I can’t find Zhuyin (Bopomofo). Unless I missed it, it’s probably not complete, though close to.
Also, it puts Vietnamese chu-num as “no longer used”. However, I’ve seen it frequently used in restaurant menus in Canada and France. Certainly, it’s not the common, modern way of writing Vietnamese, but it’s still marginally in use. Monty, if I’m not mistaken, you’ve studied Vietnamese, what’s your take?
Also, they count latin/roman as a single alphabet, but some some refer to the “English alphabet”, which is different somewhat from the French, Islandic or Vietnamese alphabets. Depending on where you draw the line, you might end up with different counts.
It’s referred to on this page, but not listed. Odd thing, I seem to remember seeing it on that site before. Maybe just bad memory.
You’re not mistaken; I studied Vietnamese. My take is that Chu-nom is no longer in use except by some really old folks. Some people may decide to spiffy up something with a display of something that looks more exotic than the current Vietnamese alphabet. Chu-nom would fill the bill. I do admit that I’d find it cool if the characters used on those Canadian and French menus were really the names of the stuff instead of just being decorative.
This page seems to try counting Latin by itself and also as part of a group. It lists “some of the languages written with the Latin alphabet” and includes English and Vietnamese.
It’s not just decorative, but I’m starting to wonder if it might not be Cantonese. The restaurants I’ve seen those menus mostly cater to the Vietnamese community.
It is not even clear that the question is well-defined. Does the Danish alphabet with three extra letters at the end (AE ligation, slashed O and A ring) count as an alphabet separate from Roman? What about Icelandic with eth and thorn? Some Cyrillic alphabets use as many as five characters that Russian doesn’t. Presumably, you would count Greek as different from Roman, but about half of their capital letters are identical to the corresponding Roman letters.
That’s a good point. There’s a sizeable enough Cantonese minority in Vietnam, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that some are operating Chinese restaurants with Chinese menus in the Vietnamese Diaspora.
It’s the rule rather than the exception here in Sydney. Most Vietnamese restaurants offer trilingual menus (Vietnamese, Chinese, English). Most also have at least some of their waiting staff able to speak Cantonese. In Vietnam itself, I noticed this was not the case generally - you had to go to Cho Lon or another “Chinese” area to get Chinese menus.
Apologies Monty, I misread your post. There are quite a few purely Chinese (usually ex-HK migrant-owned) restaurants here which offer Vietnamese language menus, but it’s not a high percentage (usually in Chinatown or the Casino area where lots of Vietnamese go - so it might just be pure marketing sense) Of course, often it’s hard to tell without knowing the owners: I go to lots of places with Vietnamese language on the menu and Cantonese conversation coming from the kitchen - it could go either way in any given case. I do know there’s lots of overlap.
Here’s the list of scripts currently supported by Unicode:
[ul]
[li]Arabic[/li][li]bengali[/li][li]bopomofo[/li][li]braille[/li][li]buhid[/li][li]canadian aboriginal[/li][li]cherokee[/li][li]cyrillic[/li][li]deseret[/li][li]devanagari[/li][li]ethiopic[/li][li]georgian[/li][li]greek[/li][li]gothic[/li][li]gujarati[/li][li]gurmukhi[/li][li]han (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters)[/li][li]hangul[/li][li]hanja (Subset of ‘han’ used in writing Korean)[/li][li]hanunoo[/li][li]hebrew[/li][li]hiragana[/li][li]ipa (International Phonetic Alphabet)[/li][li]kanji (Subset of ‘han’ used in writing Japanese)[/li][li]kannada[/li][li]katakana[/li][li]khmer[/li][li]lao[/li][li]latin[/li][li]malayalam[/li][li]math (mathematical symbols and related characters)[/li][li]mongolian[/li][li]myanmar[/li][li]ogham[/li][li]old italic[/li][li]oriya[/li][li]runic[/li][li]simplified hanzi (Subset of ‘han’ used in writing Simplified Chinese)[/li][li]sinhala[/li][li]syriac[/li][li]tagalog[/li][li]tagbanwa[/li][li]tamil[/li][li]telugu[/li][li]thaana[/li][li]thai[/li][li]tibetan [/li][li]traditional hanzi (Subset of ‘han’ used in writing Traditional Chinese)[/li][li]yi[/li][/ul]
Some of those aren’t strictly linguistic alphabets, e.g. Braille, IPA and the math symbols; and there are many overlaps, such as the various Han subsets.