Re: Global and national e-mail address

Dan,

Three observations (short this time)...

(i) Computer geeks and their possible preferences aside, people 
tend to not like transliterations (writing of a name that would 
normally be written in one character set in the characters of 
another).  Whether they like "better" transliterations more than 
"worse" transliterations is a cultural issue.

(ii) To reasonably transliterate names and languages, one needs 
not only a collection of the right phonemes, but an appropriate 
and accurate notation for tones.   You can't get those out of a 
small extension to Latin letters.  I'm told that one can get a 
reasonable approximation of all of the relevant phonemes and 
tones with IPA, but IPA not only uses some characters that are 
distinctly non-Latin-based, but also uses a rather complex 
collection of combining diacriticals.  And, at least unless one 
is a professional phonologist, learning IPA and how to use it 
accurately is _hard_ (having had people attempt to teach it to 
me twice, once when I was young enough to learn these things). 
For some hints in a reference that is easily accessible to most 
of us, see the discussion of IPA Characters in the Unicode 
definition (3.0 or 4.0, take your pick).

(iii) If one wants even an approximation to accurate 
transliteration, the symbol-overloading in Latin scripts is bad 
news.  E.g., the sound of "ö" (o with diaresis, U+00F6) is 
different in, e.g., Swedish and German.  I.e., they are 
different characters, even if they look the same and even if 
Unicode "unified" them.  If one is trying to transliterate, 
e.g., Arabic into Roman characters, does one pick a character on 
the basis of the Swedish phoneme or the German ones?  (Hint, as 
soon as you start down that path, you end up sliding toward IPA.)

It appears to me that you are proposing a very Euro-centric view 
of things, and it won't work all that well even for Europe.

regards,
    john


--On Wednesday, 10 December, 2003 10:32 +0100 Dan Oscarsson 
<[email protected]> wrote:

>
> I will here comment several comments frpm John C Klensin, Adan
> M Costello and others.
>
> With this topic I did not want to talk about replacing ASCII
> with ISO 8859-1 or about what character encoding to use.
> Instead I wanted to discuss what names could be suitable to
> use as a global fallback name.
>
> To be able to write a name you need, at least, to be able to
> have letters so you can write all phonemes used. ASCII only
> contains 26 letters and they cannot represent all phonemes
> very well. For example, Swedish have three vowals in addition
> to the ones available in ASCII. They are represented by the
> letters "åäö". These are letters, not an "a" or "o" with an
> accent above. Without those three letters you cannot write all
> Swedish names. Accents I can live without, but not the letters
> for our additional phonemes.
>
> To be able to write most names in the world I think you need
> to be able to write about 60 phonems. Not everybody need their
> own letter (English have about 45 phonems but the 26 letters
> are enough). So I would expect by adding not that many more
> letters to the ones in ASCII we could get a quite faire
> representation of all names in the world. That would be more
> acceptable  to have on a business card.
>
> And just like Adam my Swedish keyboard do not have any
> accented or diacritic letters. But I can still type quite a
> lot of them by using "compose" or "alt graph".
>
> ASCII will never be good enough for use as a "global" name for
> Swedish. But with a few more letters added it would be
> possible. I expect the same would work for most other
> languages. I would not be surprised if 35-45 letters would be
> enough to give quite good representation of the native names.
>
>    Dan
>
>