Re: Global and national e-mail address

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 09:11:39AM -0500, John C Klensin wrote:
> 
> (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.

Actually ö is pronounced the same in German and Swedish, and they
com out of the same typographical tradition, with combining an o and an
e. But they are considered differently, in German it is considered an
"o umlaut" while in Swedish it is considered a genuine letter.
Both Germans and Swedes have a specific sound for the character,
when they spell words, and incidently it is the same sound (more or
less, dialects may vary). If you had said ö as done in French or in
Dutch (where the ö is less frequent) then you were right. There ö is
considered an o with diaresis, where the diaresis accent is placed to
indicate that the o-sound is pronounced individually.

Another example of letters that are pronounced differently, is "i" and
"e" which are pronounced very differently in standard English vs standard
German, French, and Scandinavian.

But I think this does not matter for email addresses, as long as you can
write the correct name, it does not matter how it is pronounced.
Eg my last name "Simonsen" is pronounced differently in Danish and by
uninitiated English speaking persons. But it goes perfectly into one of
my email addresses [email protected] .

Furthermore it was not Unicode that unified the different "ö"s, that
was already done in iso-8859-1 and earlier charsets.

> 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.)

Yes, that is another ballpark with its own problems.

> 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.

I agree completely. I think for common email addresses we can only
use what we have today in current mail rfc's namely a subset of
us-ascii. And then for our initernationalized email addresses, we need
to have all names of persons in the world spelled correctly
in whatever script that is available in ISO 10646. 

Best regards
Keld