[ietf-provreg] Re: EPP Extensions for IDN

[Edward Lewis <Ed.Lewis@Neustar.biz>]

At 18:21 +0200 4/5/07, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 03:31:27PM +0100,
>  Dan Maharry <dan@mcd.coop> wrote
>  a message of 60 lines which said:
>
>>  - the language code for the domain name
>
>No, IDN is about scripts, not about languages, so there is no reason
>to transmit the language.

I agree with Stephane.  I was about to reply the opposite way 
yesterday but then I consulted our in-house expert on such matters.

E.g., If you are in Taiwan and write "east capital" in the local 
written language you get two Han characters.  If you are in Japan and 
write "east capital" in the local written language you get the same 
exact looking pair of Kanji/Han characters.  Never mind that one is 
Chinese and the other Japanese and thus differ when read aloud, they 
mean the same thing and look the same on paper.

Now shift to the People's Republic of China.  You will get a 
different first character but when read aloud get the same sound as 
in Taiwan.  That's because the mainland has "simplified" (reduced the 
strokes) of the Han for "east."

Let's shift to transliterating the Han to Latin characters.  You 
might get at least two different and possibly three different strings 
of Latin characters and marks corresponding to the same concept. 
(BTW, "east capital" is most commonly known around the world as 
Tokyo.)  E.g., "Middle mountain" is written as Zhongshan in the PRC 
and Cheongshan in Taiwan.  I don't know "Middle" in Japanese romaji.

At this point my expert said - for IDN policies we stick to just what 
are the equivalent looking characters.  The two native script forms 
(the Taiwan/Japan and the PRC) are considered equivalent, but not 
other semantic, homonyms, or transliterated forms.  IDN cares about 
the look (the script) and not the language meaning.  I.e., if I 
register "tokyo.biz" I do not consider "dongjing.biz" or 
"dong1jing1.biz" or "$1$2.biz as variants - where the $1 and $2 are 
the appropriate characters.  I don't get "activity.biz" (based on 
dong4jing4 meaning (n)activity) either.  (To an untrained ear, the 
tones of the Chinese language are lost making dong1jing1 sound like 
dong4jing4.)

My new understanding is that EPP is already suitable for IDN.  I 
realized this after my headache evaporated.

PS - My mail would be a lot clearer if my mail reader was capable of 
more than just ASCII. ;)

-- 
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Edward Lewis                                                +1-571-434-5468
NeuStar

Sarcasm doesn't scale.