[idn] Morning humor, Korean IETF participant proposes "no Cherokee" rule

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

Oki all,

Background: A technical body [1] is working on allowing languages other than
English to be used for domain names found in Web names and email addresses.
The goal is to prevent "looks like" confusion, such as "dot-like" characters
found in several scripts. The beneficiaries of this goal are trademark owners
using the Net. The non-beneficiaries are cybersquatters ... and some NDNs, neh?

The acronymn "IDN" that appears in the original note (attached below) means
"internationalized domain name", not some off-shore variation of "NDN" ;-)

The "morning humor" for all triballaw subscribers, not to mention the odd
CNO, UKB, and ECN enrollees and unenrolled Tsalagi both on this list and in
the frequent-forwarding paths, is assume the body [2] adopting the proposed
rule is a California 501(c)(3) acting as the technical coordination body for
the Internet, under contract to the US DoC.

What potential lines of attack may be considered by the FIL practitioner?

Does it matter if "consultation" has never taken place?

Generalizing, several NDN langauges other than Tsalagi use roman and non-roman
characters, e.g., Abenaki and several other Eastern Algonquin languages use
an "u-above-o" character for the "w" sound, reflecting the absence of the "w"
character in 17th century French. This character is usually written as the
numeral eight ("8"), but now, like the Tsalagi syllabary characters, is in
an international standard. The "no confusion" principle would prevent these
characters from being used in Web names and email addresses. Repeat for the
sets of Roman look-alike characters used when writing <insert your language
here>.

The extension of this rule to scripts not yet in this international character
standard would be to require the use of characters from the European "block",
and any remaining non-European characters from a distinct "block", rather than
creating a seperate block for all characters for any particular language.

This makes collation (sorting and searching) very difficult to implement.
The authors of the standard referenced (Unicode) are printer manufacturers,
who are both indifferent to anything other than putting ink on paper, and
don't do a lot of sales in Indian Country.

The second bit of "morning humor" is that the standard for Tsalagi used a
mid-19th century source, and the "correctness" of this source was confirmed
by a non-literate Swimmer-regime CNO official.

For extra credit, the Triballaw subscribers may comment on the legal issues
posed by non-governmental bodies normatively defining living languages. The
government of the People's Republic of China isn't amused by the same group's
treatment of Chinese.

Humorous replies to me, forward responsibly, and try not to comment on the
visual similarity of Koreans.

Kitakitamatsinopowaw,
Eric

[1] IDN Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force aka "IETF"
[2] Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, aka "ICANN"

P.S. It is interesting that the Omniglot source doesn't have the usual
borrowed-from-Europeans origin story. They also manage to cite Cree oral
history for Cree syllabics, though they give more prominance to James
Evans. Their Cree page is worth a detour!
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/cree.htm


------- Forwarded Message

Message-ID: <00c501c11584$8cca2950$ec1bd9d2@temp>
From: "Soobok Lee" <lsb@postel.co.kr>
To: <idn@ops.ietf.org>
Subject: [idn] Cherokee letters look like uppercase Latin letters
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 12:39:18 +0900
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If you look into http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13A0.pdf,
You can find most of the Cherokee letters look identical to Latin Uppercase
letters.

Do we need to allow Cherokee letters in IDN?

Soobok Lee
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/cherokee.htm

Origin
The Cherokee syllabary, reputedly invented by Chief Sequoyah of the Cherokee,
was introduced in 1819. Sequoyah's descendants claim that he was the last
surviving member of his tribe's scribe clan and the Cherokee syllabary was
invented by persons unknown at a much earlier date.
By 1820, thousands of Cherokees had learnt the syllabary, and by 1830, 90% were
literate in their own language. Books, religious texts, almanacs and newspapers
were all published using the syllabary, which was widely used for over 100
years.
The syllabary is still used, but only by a fairly small number of people.
Efforts, such the Carnegie Cherokee Project, are being made to revive both the
Cherokee language and the Cherokee syllabary.
Used to write:
Cherokee (Tsalagi), a Southern Iroquoian language spoken by around 22,500 people
in North Carolina and Oklahoma.



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