[idn] Fw: draft-ietf-idn-vidn-00.txt

["FDU - Sung Jae Shim" <sshim@mailbox.fdu.edu>]

The same email was sent from an email account which is not listed on the
mailing list. I am sorry about that.

Sung

----- Original Message -----
From: DualName - ShimSungJae <shimsungjae@dualname.com>
To: <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu>
Cc: <idn@ops.ietf.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2000 10:18 AM
Subject: Re: draft-ietf-idn-vidn-00.txt


> Valdis,
>
> Thank you for your comments on the document. Please see below for my
> responses to your comments.
>
> Sung
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu>
> To: <shimsungjae@dualname.com>
> Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2000 11:35 AM
> Subject: draft-ietf-idn-vidn-00.txt
>
> Note that there is a city in China, which used to be known in the US as
> Peking, that is now known as Beijing.  This renders suspect the following:
>
>    inverse of transcription of phonemes into characters. Second, each
>    individual phoneme of the local language is matched with an
>    equivalent phoneme of English that has the same or most proximate
>    sound. Third, each phoneme of English is transcribed into the
>
> This could cause a problem if the underlying domain name has to change due
> to a change in the "preferred" transliteration rules, which has been known
> to happen.
>
> Sung: A city in China, which used to be known in English-speaking regions
as
> "Peking," is now known as "Beijing." The reason for this may be that
> English-speaking people began to pronounce the city's name as "peking" for
> some reason, probably for their convenience of pronunciation, although the
> city's name is pronounced as "beijing" among Chinese-speaking people. The
> correct pronunciation of the city's name in Chinese is "beijing" as used
> today.
>
> Sung: Anyway, let's assume that the city's name can be pronounced as
> "peking," "beijing" and others since the same characters in Chinese can be
> transliterated differently into English. Thus, when the city's name is
> entered in Chinese, VIDN method converts it into several possible
> corresponding domain names in English, including "peking," "beijing" and
> others, as long as the phonemes of the characters of the resulting domain
> names in English have the same or proximate sounds as the phonemes
> represented by the input characters in Chinese. This is
> one-to-many mapping of VIDN. Further, only one of these, for instance
> "beijing", can be matched with the city's name in Chinese, with the coding
> scheme designed for one-to-one matching (see the document for details),
and
> the others including "peking" can be listed as alternatives.
>
> Sung: For the conversion from a local language into English, VIDN does not
> rely on a certain set of "preferred" transliteration rules which may
change
> over time, but it uses a much more fundamental approach. VIDN uses the
> phonemes of the respective two languages (a local language and English) as
a
> medium of the transliteration, and so, there is no need to change the
> underlying domain names in English. In fact, most transliteration rules
are
> based upon the systems of sounds of the respective languages, and the
units
> of such systems are phonemes. Therefore, VIDN can incorporate most, if not
> all, possible transliteration rules, including all those "preferred,"
> customary, old, or new ones.
>
> Also, I am told that Mandarin Chinese and other Chinese dialects differ on
> the pronunciation of ideograms, although they agree on the meaning of the
> glyph.  As a result, it's quite possible that depending which
pronunciation
> is used, several domain names would be required, unless (for instance) the
> Mandarin variant was required.
>
> Sung: Mandarin Chinese and other Chinese dialects differ on
> the pronunciation of ideograms, although they agree on the meaning of the
> glyph. In this case, VIDN may provide several conversion modules, with
each
> being used for conversion of each Chinese dialect into English. Please
note
> that VIDN does NOT actually create and require domain names registered in
> local languages, but it allows using virtual domain names in local
languages
> as the user wishes. Again, there is no need to change the underlying
domain
> names in English in this case.
>
> Section 4.4 Testing results:
>
>    that a user can choose one. The testing results of a sample of
>    randomly selected domain names used in Korea show that the program
>    can cover more than ninety percent of the sample. The results
>    indicate that more than ninety percent of web sites in Korea can be
>    accessed using virtual domain names in Korean without creating
>    additional domain names in Korean. The remaining ten percent of
>
> A careful re-reading of this seems to indicate that what this *really*
means
> is that "90% of the time, our software used the same mapping for Korean
> words that people had *already* used to force their domain name into the
> DNS".  There is no indication that the results are extensible to languages
> other than Korean.  For instance, it shows no indication of being able to
> encode ISO8859-X national variants for X<>1 without problems (for
instance,
> how do you handle collisions between 8859-1 German u-umlaut and 8859-4
> Latvian u-bar, which are different characters, but are roughly the same
from
> an English viewpoint - other examples probably exist as well).  In
general,
> the scheme fails miserably if the phoneme is one that is not even
> approximated
> in English (for instance, the various 'click' sounds used in many African
> tribal languages).
>
> Sung: Phonemes are very universal, being applicable to any language. In
the
> example cited above, the collision between 8859-1 German u-umlaut and
8859-4
> Latvian u-bar may occur when the characters representing the phonemes of
> 8859-1 German u-umlaut and 8859-4 Latvian u-bar are actually used and
> registered as internationalized domain names. VIDN do NOT register any
> internationalized domain name, BUT it allows using internationalized
domain
> names virtually. Thus, both 8859-1 German u-umlaut and 8859-4 Latvian
u-bar
> will result in the same character(s) in English, probably "u" or "eu",
since
> the sounds of the phonemes represented by the two characters are the same.
>
> Sung: The transliteration between Korean and English is very wild as you
may
> know. The testing results of Korean-English conversion suggest that VIDN
can
> be applicable to other languages, too. Of course, there may be some domain
> names in English to be changed so that users can use the corresponding
> virtual domain names in a local language more easily and intuitively. But
> compare the number of internationalized domain names that we have to
> actually create and register when we use special UCS encoding schemes or
> separate directory services, with the number of domain names in English
that
> we need to add to follow the transliteration principles of VIDN. Going
back
> the examples above, the user can still access the sites using "peking" and
> "beijing" in English, while the sites are also accessible using virtual
> domain names in Chinese, although they are not actually created and
> registered in Chinese.
>
> --
>     Valdis Kletnieks
>     Operating Systems Analyst
>     Virginia Tech
>
>