Re: [idn] I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-idn-vidn-00.txt

[Harald Alvestrand <Harald@Alvestrand.no>]

I have tried to read your draft (again). It is problematic because you 
chose to represent non-ACII characters as "??" rather than as character 
names or Unicode codepoints.

Your specification does not say where the "pre-assigned codes" are stored, 
transferred and checked. This is critical to evaluating your draft.

Please revise.

One point:

    First, each entity-defined portion of a virtual domain name in the
    local language is decomposed into individual characters or sets of
    characters so that each individual character or set of characters can
    represent an individual phoneme of the local language, which is the
    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
    corresponding character or set of characters in English. Finally, all
    the characters or sets of characters converted into English are
    united to compose the corresponding entity-defined portion of an
    actual domain name in English.

This process is severely underdefined; English is not a good language for 
finding systematic phoneme representations.

If you start off with an English word and do this, you will usually end up 
with a different word, and sometimes this word will be English.

Consider that the pronounciation of "bridge" is (roughly) "bri-tsch". And 
that "cite" and "sight" have the same prononunciation in English (homonyms).

If you do this to a language using a Latin-based script, the result is even 
more confusing; "skjerm" in Norwegian is pronounced almost as if it was 
"charm" in English. And there are the homographs - "lever" (liver) and 
"lever" (alive) are pronounced differently (lev-ER and LE-ver respectively).

I do not understand how a process of "disambiguation" that cannot be made 
to work with any pair of languages I understand is going to help much with 
the problems I don't.
But I could be wrong.


--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, alvestrand@cisco.com
+47 41 44 29 94
Personal email: Harald@Alvestrand.no