[vip] Suggested meta-questions to think about

[Daniel Kalchev]

Nadya,

Thanks for your comments.

On Jun 23, 2011, at 18:46 , Nadya Morozova wrote:

> Also, Daniel says that in Cyrillic, variants are word-based rather than character-based and gives an example of E and Ё in one word. I’m not sure I follow the example and logic and tend to disagree, although the exception of “обед” given later on makes a point. I’ll be happy to have a separate discussion with the Cyrillic group to clarify this, but as a linguist and native Russian speaker, I do not see a problem with Ё using E forming variant domain names. There is always a character layer, pure spelling with no pronunciation issues, and that’s what we need to focus on, as that’s what makes up an FQDN.
> 
> So, taking on board Siavash’s advice, I’ve made up a short list of working definitions for the purpose of this discussion, just to make myself clear. For me, an atomic unit here is a specific character within a specific language, and the variations this character produces when forming a (domain) name. Then “variant” can be a string of characters that is similar and interchangeable with another string; all “variant” strings form a “bundle”, an atomic domain unit that can be treated as one – cf. the SC & TC treatments in ccTLD registries. If two strings are similar but one cannot be mistaken for another, they are not variants. 
> 
> 
I still feel a need to clarify the purpose of my examples.

The purpose of my examples is to demonstrate, that at least in Bulgarian (Cyrliic) and I believe also in Russian, variants are label (word) based. Defining variant characters makes no sense, because the variants are language specific and a language is defined by words and not the alphabet alone (otherwise, you should consider Bulgarian and Russian and Serbian one and the same language).

Therefore, in my opinion it is useless to try to define variant characters, within s script (say, Bulgarian), because what is variant for one language is not variant for another and what might be variant for the spelling of one word, might not be variant for other. Dublets in Bulgarian is yet another form of word variants and they definitely cannot be described by any form of character variants.

I see, that although you disagree with my suggestion that variants are label (word) base, you later refer to variant as word based in your comments.

just wanted to clarify this.

Daniel Kalchev
Register.BG
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