<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Greetings vip@ readers,<div><br><div><div>On Jun 23, 2011, at 1:46 PM, Nadya Morozova wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">
</font><p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;" class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; "><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US">By the way,
in Russian, there’s a similar glottal stop situation with the old character Yer
or Hard Sign, </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: RU;" lang="RU">ъ</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US">, often replaced by an apostrophe in
modern Russian. No other language
using Cyrillic alphabet has this character except Bulgarian, where it denotes a
specific sound. For Russian IDNs, should the spelling with no Yer be a variant
of the spelling with it, and vice versa? There are a number of other characters
in Russian that are somehow “special”, including the mentioned </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: RU;" lang="RU">Ё</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US"> or characters that in some fonts may be confusingly similar to other
letters. In some cases, it is not reasonable to treat these similarities as
variants; instead, the confusion can be avoided prohibiting registration of
names that can be confusingly similar to a canonical string that has already been
registered.</span></span></p><div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="3"><font face="Calibri"></font></font></div></blockquote><div>Excuse me Nadya, but as native Russian (and Ukrainian) speaker I beg to differ - apostrophe is not a character of Russian aphabet</div><div>(although it is one for Ukrainian), and spelling with "trailing hard sign" was not used in Soviet Union, and now Russia, since 1917.</div><div>Hard sign is used as a letter in several Russian words as a glottal stop indeed (unlike in Bulgarian, where it is a vowel character.)</div><div><br></div><div>Should we also consider variants of orphography in century-old use - or minor (poetic) uses? (example for Russian: черный / чорный).</div><div> </div><div>A side note on Ukrainian while I am on it - the apostrophe is not a "real" Unicode character and does not exist in uppercase format;</div><div>perhaps it can be handled similarly to German eszet (ß) but this is not yet supported (at least, in IDN registrations for UA we don't allow it.)</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="3"><font face="Calibri"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US">Perhaps, Vladimir Shadrunov from the .tel Registry could share
Telnic’s experiences in defining language policies for Russian and other
supported IDN languages in .tel. </span></font></font></div></blockquote><div>This would be very helpful, indeed.</div><div><br></div></div></div></body></html>