> 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 lest someone might think that this curiosity of single character words only applies to vowel sounds, in Russian, the Cyrillic letter equivalents of v, k and s, are also single letter words. > On the other hand, characters in ideographic scripts such as > Han are not mere sounds or glyphs; they represent one or more > concepts. Some people might dispute that and say that they represent syllables. Since the various Chinese dialects tend to have monosyllabic words, almost all possible syllables also represent a word or concept. However, many concepts in modern Chinese dialects require multiple syllables to express them and therefore multiple characters to write them. So there isn't really a one to one mapping of word, syllable, concept as many people suppose. It would be more defensible to disallow single codepoint labels where the code point represents a single consonant sound or a single vowel sound. That still leaves a grey area of syllabic symbol systems such as Hiragana, Inuit syllabics, etc. However, the number of people affected by a rule on syllabics is small enough that one could reasonably poll representatives of these language communities to see if a rule prohibiting single-syllable TLDs would cause hardship. Note that the current system allows both single syllable TLDs such as .to and single ideograph TLDs such as .sing when ASCII characters are used. Or if you want to include tones, then .sing4 would be a single ideographic codepoint. I think that it would be a good thing to update RFC 2606 to collect the various arguments and reasoning so that the ICANN experts have some guidance to work from. If we can't deal with all the corner cases in an updated RFC, then at least ICANN experts have a point of reference from which to depart, or not. --Michael Dillon _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf