Re: Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in progress

Martin Duerst scripsit:

> Please note that above, we are always speaking about script, not language.
> That's very important, current TLDs (both cc and g) are in the Latin script,
> mostly pretty language-agnostic or at least multi-language.

Well, in fact gTLDs are intensely English-oriented, disguised a bit by
the fact that many languages of Europe have borrowed the same Latin words
that English has (company, organization, international).  Clearly in
Vietnamese they are arbitrary neologisms.

I foresee nasty political struggles coming down the road at us here.
For example, who gets to decide the Arabic-script abbreviation of ".us",
the arabophones (355K speakers in the U.S.) or the persophones (201K
speakers in the U.S.)?

(Random fact: Chinese is now the third most widely spoken language
in the U.S., with about 2 million speakers.)

-- 
While staying with the Asonu, I met a man from      John Cowan
the Candensian plane, which is very much like       cowan@ccil.org
ours, only more of it consists of Toronto.          http://:www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

Received on Thursday, 25 October 2007 13:16:14 UTC