The reason I ask is not because I’m a troll, it’s because on the back of my little girls Baby Einstein flash cards there are translations of every object into 6 or 7 languages.
Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Hebrew , and a few others.
No Chinese? No Portugese ?
There has got to be 100 times the number of portugese speakers here, and 1000 times the number of Chinese! Hebrew? How does it rank in terms of number of speakers worldwide? (I’m guessin’ 1%!)
Worldwide most Jewish people can read some Hebrew and know a few words that they may remember from their Bar Mitzvah training. Not too many outside of Israel are fluent.
Wikipedia guesses about 5 million Hebrew speakers, which should be just under .1% of the world population. However, Hebrew-speaking customers, or those who would like to teach their kids Hebrew, probably comprise more than that percentage.
Translating the cards into Chinese is probably not worthwhile, because of the poor protection for intellectual property in the People’s Republic, as well as the wide availability of very cheap domestic flashcards produced there. Yeah, I know this could apply to other languages as well; my theory’s not perfect.
I dunno about Portuguese - maybe just too close to Spanish, and there’s only so much space on a card.
I tried to find whether the company had an Israeli connection, but the history page says Baby Einstein was started in 1997 by “a mom”. For all we know, she was a Nepalese peasant. The company is now a part of Disney.
According to adherents.com and other estimates I’ve heard, it’s about 0.22% - 14 million people.
There are different Chinese dialects and they may have wanted to avoid being confusing. Still, this is probably one of those Western-centric thing. Like when people talk about “the three major religions,” meaning Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, even though Buddhism, Hinduism, Sihks, and a number of other less famous faiths are much larger than Judaism. Just one of those things, I think. By comparison, when you combine the populations of Brazil and Portugal - although I don’t know how many Brazilians speak other languages - you get almost 200 million people.
There’s no point at all in trying to correlate what languages are actually vehicular to their size or importance. After all, there are more Catalan speakers than Danish speakers – but which language are you more likely to see on a battery packet or an instruction manual?
In the arena of politics, I’d say Israel gets a lot of play since it is ground zero in a very touchy geopolitical conundrum. In the arena of language, I haven’t noticed that it gets an inordinate amount of play. As stated earlier, outside of Israel, most Jews primarily speak/read the local language.
:dubious: I know many non-religious Jews, including just about everyone in my extended family who can’t understand a word of Hebrew. Yiddish, on the other hand…!
It’s not just the prevalance of Hebrew that the company overestimates. According to this exerpt from the 2000 US Census data, those folks are missing 5 of the 10 languages most frequently spoken in this country.
Number of Speakers (millions)
215.4 English
28.1 Spanish
2.0 Chinese
1.6 French
1.4 German
1.2 Tagalog
1.0 Vietnamese
1.0 Italian
0.9 Korean
0.7 Russian
Hebrew has a historical and cultural significance in the US and western Europe, far beyond its modern revival as a spoken language in Israel, due to its association with the scriptures. It has significance for Christians, not just for Jews. For many centuries it was regarded as one of the languages that any learned person should know, along with Latin and ancient Greek.
If these cards are being marketed in the US, I would guess offhand there are many more Jews in the US that speak Yiddish than Hebrew.
I would think if they wanted to include a language from the Middle East, classical Arabic would be much more useful. A few million Hebrew speakers vs. hundreds of buttloads of Arabs, plus all those non-Arab Muslims who have studied it.
I should think that Jewish families anywhere raising their children in the faith would look at the cards as a good buy if they could help in the education of their children in reading a language they’ll be introduced to at temple and/or in Hebrew school.
It may be a small number of people compared to world popualtion, but a smart market to include in flashcards for teaching a child to learn a language.
In the area of politics, there are many reasons. But in the area of language, I’m unaware about Hebrew “geting so much play”.
In tis case, if the cards are translated in Hebrew, we can safely assume that it’s for business reasons. Israel being a wealthy country, I suppose it’s a good enough reason to sell the stuff there hence translate it in the local language. Why not in Chinese? Probably because the cards wouldn’t sell there. Why not in Portuguese? Maybe because they didn’t try to penetrate the Brazilian market, or maybe cards intended for Portuguese customers are printed elsewhere, say, in Europe, with a tranlation in Danish, Italian, etc…on them.
It’s not a factual answer, of course, but I’m certain they aren’t printing an Hebrew translation just for the sake of promoting this language.