Re: i18n name badges

At 08:23 AM 11/19/2003, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Proposals for making email addresses fully internationalized were a hot 
> topic in Minneapolis. I'd like to suggest a more modest reform: fully 
> internationalized IETF name badges. IETF 59 might be a fine venue for 
> rolling those out...
No problem, as long as nobody expects anyone in particular to actually be 
able to *read* the name badges. I don't read Han (simplified or 
traditional), Korean, Kanji, Cyrillic, Arab (either alphabet) or a variety 
of other alphabets. I manage with umlauts and such, because I can make a 
noise and the other person can say "yes, that's me, the way you pronounce 
my name is...". But I have no clue how to start in a non-ascii-like 
alphabet, and frankly with tonal languages such as Chinese my western mouth 
is likely to injure the person's name trying to get it out.
Aside: I had a Taiwanese employee once who would periodically give me 
lessons on how to say her name. It sounded to *me* like I was pronouncing 
it her way. One can only wonder what she was hearing...
Just speaking for myself, one of the things I really like about name badges 
is being able to determine, upon inspection, what to call the person 
standing in front of me.
BTW, while I understand that many Asians can read each other's writing, I 
don't think that implies they can read Cyrillic or Arab either. They're in 
a similar boat, if not the same one.
What I would suggest, if we do this, is writing the person's name *twice*: 
once in their native character set, and once in a form that an 
english-reader can read. The latter is an established interchange architecture.