--On Friday, 04 July, 2008 15:01 -0400 William Tan
<dready(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
John,
To add to your point, one should also consider the question of
embedded semantics in a single-character label.
Alphabetic scripts such as Latin mostly represent sounds used
to make up words. While one can certainly find some legitimate
single-character words (such as the article "a" or the personal
pronoun "i") and dream up others, it would not be very
convincing in the face of your explanation #3.
Agreed.
On the other hand, characters in ideographic scripts such as
Han are not mere sounds or glyphs; they represent one or more
concepts. Therefore, a single-ideographic-character TLD label
is certainly more justifiable. I would even go as far as to
suggest that it is essential in many cases. For example, "猫"
(U+ 732B) in both Simplified Chinese and Japanese means "cat"
as in English, not the abbreviation for Catalan nor the UNIX
command. The reverse translation of "cat" yields the exact
character in Simplified Chinese, though in Japanese sometimes
the Hiragana sequence "ねこ" is also used. One would be
hard-pressed to come up with a different character to
represent the same concept in Han, aside from the traditional
Chinese counterpart "??" (U+8C93).
Yes. As I tried to indicate, I was trying to be brief and
obviously left some things out as a result. While I agree with
what you say above, it also opens another question. I'm not
quite ready to agree with the often-expressed principle that
people have some "right" to register particular names. For
example, IBM clearly owns a well-known mark "ibm". That gives
them some rights --in trademark law, rather than the DNS-- to
prevent anyone else from using the string, at least in ways that
would create confusion. But it doesn't give them any inherent
"rights" to register the name in the DNS. In this specific
case, while I don't see any reason to ban
single-"ideographic"-letter TLDs, I also don't believe that the
fact that U+732B, by itself, means "cat" creates any intrinsic
right to register it in the DNS. If there were a compelling
reason to ban single-letter ideographic TLDs, I would not
consider your "cat" example to be particularly compelling
because I don't believe there is a "right" to a TLD for cats or
the equivalent.
That distinction is important because I think it quite likely
that as we look at other alphabetic scripts with relatively
small numbers of characters, we are quite likely to find some
where more, and more significant, words are spelled with only
one character than is the case with Western European languages.
And I believe the rule for those scripts, for the reasons given
in my earlier note, should be "no single-letter domains", not
"no single-letter domains unless one can find a dictionary
entry".
I don't know what the present thinking is on the idea of
non-semantic TLDs, but IMHO the social expectations of DNS
usage is cast in stone. Jon's idea would simply shift the
semantics to the second level, thereby creating 24 roots
instead of a single "."
As I indicated, I think that particular idea is no longer
relevant (if it ever was). I'm happy to engage in speculation
about whether it could ever have worked, but only in the
presence of strong drink.
john
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