<div>Dmitry,</div><div> </div><div>Thanks for the clarification. I didn't mean the old trailing hard sign, was talking about the modern use of the hard sign in the middle of words and that it's sometimes replaced by an apostrophe, esp. in informal writing or advertising. Agreed, the apostrophe is not officially in the alphabet so any "colloquial" use can be ignored. <br>
</div><div>Best regards,</div><div>Nadya</div><div><br> </div><div class="gmail_quote">2011/6/24 Dmitry Kohmanyuk <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dk@nic.net.ua">dk@nic.net.ua</a>></span><br><blockquote style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid;" class="gmail_quote">
<div style="word-wrap: break-word;">Greetings vip@ readers,<div><br><div><div class="im"><div>On Jun 23, 2011, at 1:46 PM, Nadya Morozova wrote:</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">
</font><p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span 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 lang="RU">ъ</span><span 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 lang="RU">Ё</span><span 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><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><div class="im"><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;" class="MsoNormal">
<font size="3"><font face="Calibri"><span 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><div>This would be very helpful, indeed.</div><div><br></div></div></div></div></blockquote></div><br>