--On Friday, 04 July, 2008 15:01 -0400 William Tan<dready@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> John,> > To add to your point, one should also consider the question of> embedded semantics in a single-character label.> > Alphabetic scripts such as Latin mostly represent sounds used> to make up words. While one can certainly find some legitimate> single-character words (such as the article "a" or the personal> pronoun "i") and dream up others, it would not be very> convincing in the face of your explanation #3.
Agreed. > On the other hand, characters in ideographic scripts such as> Han are not mere sounds or glyphs; they represent one or more> concepts. Therefore, a single-ideographic-character TLD label> is certainly more justifiable. I would even go as far as to> suggest that it is essential in many cases. For example, "猫"> (U+ 732B) in both Simplified Chinese and Japanese means "cat"> as in English, not the abbreviation for Catalan nor the UNIX> command. The reverse translation of "cat" yields the exact> character in Simplified Chinese, though in Japanese sometimes> the Hiragana sequence "ねこ" is also used. One would be> hard-pressed to come up with a different character to> represent the same concept in Han, aside from the traditional> Chinese counterpart "??" (U+8C93).
Yes. As I tried to indicate, I was trying to be brief andobviously left some things out as a result. While I agree withwhat you say above, it also opens another question. I'm notquite ready to agree with the often-expressed principle thatpeople have some "right" to register particular names. Forexample, IBM clearly owns a well-known mark "ibm". That givesthem some rights --in trademark law, rather than the DNS-- toprevent anyone else from using the string, at least in ways thatwould create confusion. But it doesn't give them any inherent"rights" to register the name in the DNS. In this specificcase, while I don't see any reason to bansingle-"ideographic"-letter TLDs, I also don't believe that thefact that U+732B, by itself, means "cat" creates any intrinsicright to register it in the DNS. If there were a compellingreason to ban single-letter ideographic TLDs, I would notconsider your "cat" example to be particularly compellingbecause I don't believe there is a "right" to a TLD for cats orthe equivalent.
That distinction is important because I think it quite likelythat as we look at other alphabetic scripts with relativelysmall numbers of characters, we are quite likely to find somewhere more, and more significant, words are spelled with onlyone character than is the case with Western European languages.And I believe the rule for those scripts, for the reasons givenin my earlier note, should be "no single-letter domains", not"no single-letter domains unless one can find a dictionaryentry".
> I don't know what the present thinking is on the idea of> non-semantic TLDs, but IMHO the social expectations of DNS> usage is cast in stone. Jon's idea would simply shift the> semantics to the second level, thereby creating 24 roots> instead of a single "."
As I indicated, I think that particular idea is no longerrelevant (if it ever was). I'm happy to engage in speculationabout whether it could ever have worked, but only in thepresence of strong drink.
john
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