--On Wednesday, November 19, 2003 11:15 -0800 Fred Baker
<fred@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> At 08:23 AM 11/19/2003, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>> Proposals for making email addresses fully internationalized
>> were a hot topic in Minneapolis. I'd like to suggest a more
>> modest reform: fully internationalized IETF name badges.
>> IETF 59 might be a fine venue for rolling those out...
>
> No problem, as long as nobody expects anyone in particular to
> actually be able to *read* the name badges. I don't read Han
> (simplified or traditional), Korean, Kanji, Cyrillic, Arab
> (either alphabet) or a variety of other alphabets. I manage
> with umlauts and such, because I can make a noise and the
> other person can say "yes, that's me, the way you pronounce my
> name is...". But I have no clue how to start in a
> non-ascii-like alphabet, and frankly with tonal languages such
> as Chinese my western mouth is likely to injure the person's
> name trying to get it out.
>
> Aside: I had a Taiwanese employee once who would periodically
> give me lessons on how to say her name. It sounded to *me*
> like I was pronouncing it her way. One can only wonder what
> she was hearing...
>
> Just speaking for myself, one of the things I really like
> about name badges is being able to determine, upon inspection,
> what to call the person standing in front of me.
>
> BTW, while I understand that many Asians can read each other's
> writing, I don't think that implies they can read Cyrillic or
> Arab either. They're in a similar boat, if not the same one.
>
> What I would suggest, if we do this, is writing the person's
> name *twice*: once in their native character set, and once in
> a form that an english-reader can read. The latter is an
> established interchange architecture.
Fred, this is exactly what I was suggesting, only partially in
jest. Native character set, plus punycode, which is much more
precise than a transliteration. If we don't like the punycode
form, we probably need to think about what we are doing to
users in the absence of a serious presentation layer.
john