RE: Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in progress

+1 to what John says. (I've said similar things before.)

RI

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
 
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/blog/
http://rishida.net/

 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-i18n-core-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:public-i18n-core-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of John Cowan
> Sent: 25 October 2007 14:15
> To: Martin Duerst
> Cc: Daniel Dardailler; Najib Tounsi; 'WWW International'; W3C 
> Offices; public-i18n-core@w3.org
> Subject: 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
>