[vip] Educational session on existing variant practices

[JFC Morfin]

Daniel,
we obviouly agree. However, this agreement IS _the_ problem we meet, because:

1. it concerns a much more general area than ICANN and the Internet. 
Actually the entire digital ecosystem.

The only place I can imagine it belongs to is a multilingualisation 
oriented ISO 3166-4. I made called a meeting a few years ago between 
ISO 3166/MA, ISO/CS (HQ), AFNOR (French standards) who managed 
ISO/TC46 the ISO 3166/MA belongs to, BSI (British Standards) who 
managed ISO/TC37 responsible for ISO 639 (names of languages), ICANN 
(they were two to come to Paris) and me. The point was that the BSI 
was introducing an ISO 3166-4 NWIP (new work intemproposition) that 
would have "Anglo-saxonICANNized" the digital ecosystem. As 
a  Something I obviously opposed. It resulted in an international 
vote concerning this proposition. It was only actively supported by 
... UK, Ireland and after the limit date, ANSI (USA) and therefore failed.

Since the same persons are still involed who pushed out David Dalby 
the initiator of ISO 639-6 the needed counterpart of ISO 3166-1 to 
form a stable 3166-4 document, ISO is probably still not the place 
for 3166-4. So, I reserved 3166-4.org for the IUCG to host that work. 
To prepare such a document I introduced the ccTAG concept: 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mltf-jfcm-cctags-00. In line with 
the ISO 3166-1:2006 which introduced the basis for multilinguisation 
in norms and standards, lead to my IDNA2008 position and consensus, 
and should lead to the core of the Intersem (Semiotic and semantic 
Internet) I try to pioneer.

2. Eventually, our agreement will have to technically support in the 
simplest and broadest way (RFC 3439) a common digital basis for every 
subsidiary use oriented further development.

IMHO, if we do not consider these two points in strict parallel, we will fail.

Best
jfc





At 10:32 26/07/2011, Daniel Kalchev wrote:


>On 26.07.11 11:14, JFC Morfin wrote:
>>>In English the "æ" is a ligature, and in some more languages. It 
>>>is a separate letter and *not* a ligature in the Scandinavian 
>>>languages that uses it.
>>>
>>>So whether something is a ligature, and because of that what is 
>>>"the same" is context dependent.
>>>
>>>    Patrik
>>
>>
>>In such a case, the solution seems to be to use a table where the 
>>visual geometric symbol æ can be freely used by people along their 
>>own orthotypography of their own language without caring about the 
>>ways other languages, cultures, typographies, orthotypographies. 
>>Either it is possible to bridge such a graphcode with unicode and 
>>we have to do it, or it is not and here is the problem we (VIP, 
>>PRECIS, IUCG, ...) have to address.
>
>First, let's agree that we discuss variants not because of computers 
>(DNS, as such), but because of humans.
>It is humans that can declare something to be a variant or not. For 
>computers and DNS in particular it is all different and computers 
>and DNS, do not have any problem to resolve here.
>
>When we consider the way humans read, we need to consider the fact 
>that humans do not match characters in a (Unicode? ;) table, but 
>rather interpret what they see and switch context. If the majority 
>of the text is Cyrillic, as indicated by the presence of unique 
>Cyrillic-(only/mostly) characters, then the human considers that 
>text 'Cyrillic' and the letter 'a' is therefore Cyrillic Small 
>Letter A, and not Latin Small Letter A -- however identical those 
>might look. Same for Greek and even much easier for the Arabic/Chinese scripts.
>
>One common argument that pops up in such discussions is that 'most 
>of the world uses ASCII already' -- but let me remind the saying "It 
>all looks Greek to me" (or "Graecum est; non legitur"). In the not 
>so distant future, DNS will not be ASCII-mostly anymore. We need to 
>base our work on that assumption, or it will be obsolete in just few years.
>
>Daniel
>
>