[Summary]
In December 1995, Yoshi Mikami, a computer scientist at Asia Info
Network in Fujisawa, Japan, created the website "The Languages of
the World by Computers and the Internet", also known as the Logos
Home Page or Kotoba Home Page, "to summarize there the brief
history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing system and
computer processing aspects for each of the six major languages of
the world, in English and Japanese". As a second step, Yoshi
Mikami was also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi
Kohara) of "The Multilingual Web Guide" (Japanese edition), a
print book published in August 1997 by O'Reilly Japan, and
translated in 1998 into English, French and German.
***
In December 1995, Yoshi Mikami created the website "The Languages
of the World by Computers and the Internet", also known as the
Logos Home Page or Kotoba Home Page, "to summarize there the brief
history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing system and
computer processing aspects for each of the six major languages of
the world, in English and Japanese".
Yoshi Mikami was a computer scientist at Asia Info Network in
Fujisawa, Japan. As a second step, one year after launching his
website, he was also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and
Nobutoshi Kohara) of "The Multilingual Web Guide" (Japanese
edition), a print book published in August 1997 by O'Reilly Japan,
and translated in 1998 into English, French and German.
Yoshi explained in December 1998: "My native tongue is Japanese.
Because I had my graduate education in the U.S. and worked in the
computer business, I became bilingual in Japanese and American
English. I was always interested in languages and different
cultures, so I learned some Russian, French and Chinese along the
way. In late 1995, I created on the web ‘The Languages of the
World by Computers and the Internet’ and tried to summarize there
the brief history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing
system and computer processing aspects for each of the six major
languages of the world, in English and Japanese. As I gained more
experience, I invited my two associates to help me write a book on
viewing, understanding and creating multilingual webpages, which
was published in August 1997 as 'The Multilingual Web Guide', in a
Japanese edition, the world's first book on such a subject."
As for multilingualism, Yoshi added: "Thousands of years ago, in
Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more concerned about
communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language,
but in several. In our modern world, most nation states have each
adopted one language for their own use. I predict greater use of
different languages and multilingual pages on the internet, not a
simple gravitation to American English, and also more creative use
of multilingual computer translation. 99% of the websites created
in Japan are written in Japanese.”