Re: language (or script?) tagging in draft-obispo-epp-idn-00.txt

Keith Gaughan <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.provreg
Organization Blacknight Internet Solutions
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 04/01/12 20:25, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 05:53:31PM +0000, Keith Gaughan wrote:
>> Instead, 'writing system'[1] would be better: so long as the writing system
>> contains no homographs[2], there's no issue.
> 
> Alas, most alphabetic languages are full of homographs.  But I bet
> that isn't what you mean, anyway; homograph turns out to have an
> established meaning in linguistics, and it isn't "two letters that
> look the same".  In the ICANN VIP discussions we settled on
> "homoglyph" as a possibly useful alternative.  Cary Karp has extensive
> opinions about this.

I prefer 'homoglyph' myself, but nearly every time I've seen mention of the
attack, the word 'homograph' rather than 'homoglyph' is used.

>> [1] By which I mean, all the languages that use the Latin alphabet could be
>>     said to share a common script and writing system, which are both the same
>>     thing. It's not an ideal term, I know.
> 
> Indeed, it's wrong, as a consideration of the fall-back handling of
> o-with-diaeresis in Swedish and German illustrates.  German considers
> ö to be an o with an accent on it.  In Swedish, it's a separate
> letter.  That's why German orthography can fall back to "oe" but
> Swedish doesn't.

Although an interesting historical note is that Swedish 'ö' started out as
'oe'.

>> [3] I can't recall whether Traditional and Simplified Han characters occupy
>>     different code points in general, or the same ones.
> 
> They're different code points, and different Abstract Characters in
> Unicode terms; but there are usually pairs (with some nasty corner
> cases) of the same Conceptual Characters in TC and SC.  Also, since
> they're all part of Unihan, they're all "the same script". 

Thought that, but couldn't remember.

K.

-- 
Keith Gaughan, Senior Developer
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