> On 2 Oct 2018, at 20:45, John R Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> ISTM that it’s always English speakers who are concerned about people who speak languages not written in Latin characters. >> >> Thanks you for your concern, but I don’t think that forking technical discussions and coming up with drafts that most of the community will not be able to read is solving any problem. > > I don't want and I'm pretty sure Lloyd doesn want anyone to write I-Ds in Hebrew or Tamil, I want people who can say informed things about IDN and other i18n proposals that involve strings written in their languages. Lloyd’s proposal is about discussions happening in a foreign language which lead to drafts in that foreign language, although he probably intended that language to be Chinese rather than Hebrew or Tamil. I still think that having separate discussions in two languages on the same technical issue is less productive that having one such discussion, even if the common language is not the most convenient for all participants. At I2NSF we have a unique situation that most of our draft authors are Korean. It may be more productive for them to have the technical discussions in Korean, but that would exclude any other participants (as well as the chairs). I just don’t think it would be a good idea, and to be clear, nobody has suggested that we do this — I am only using it as an example. As for i18n, I don’t think that I or any other foreign language speaker have any special competence in any of this. I can spot bi-directional failure, such as the “I speak Hebrew” buttons from a few years ago that were printed backwards, but I think any of our unicode experts knows more about the issues of bi-directionality and scripts with multiple forms (or is it glyphs?) far more than I do. I can only look at an output and say, “No, this doesn’t look right”. Yoav
