#Creator of The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet, and
co-author of The Multilingual Web Guide
Set up in December 1995 by Yoshi Mikami, The Languages of the World by Computers
and the Internet (known as Logos Home Page or Kotoba Home Page) gives for each
language a brief history, its features, writing system and character set and
keyboard for computer and Internet processing.
Yoshi Mikami is also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara) of
The Multilingual Web Guide, first published in Japanese in August 1997 (O'Reilly
Japan, ISBN 4-900900-23-0), and translated into English, French and German.
*Interview of December 17, 1998
= What is your experience with languages?
My native tongue is Japanese. Because I had my graduate education in the US 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 web pages, which was published in August 1997 as The Multilingual
Web Guide, in a Japanese edition, the world's first book on such a subject.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
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.