[council] Re: Regarding issues report on IDNs

[Cary Karp <ck@nic.museum>]

> Suppose 20 languages or 200 languages may NOT be considered EVERY
> language, how about when we have two million languages?  Someone
> mentioned that nobody is going to put every language in every
> equivalent of say ".com" translated. etc. or that English is the
> root language of the Internet.

The most frequently cited estimate of the number of languages
currently spoken in the world is just over 6,000. This number is
shrinking, not growing. (The rate at which this is happening is truly
alarming and the potential of the Internet for reversing at least some
portion of the situation has yet to be fully considered -- that's why
IDN is so important to me.) The number of languages that are both
spoken and written is significantly smaller. The number of written
languages that are realistically likely to be proposed for inclusion
on any level in the DNS is smaller still; in the root, even fewer. I
believe that we can safely continue this discussion under the
assumption that that number will be in the hundreds, and that any
speculative quantitative effects can be calculated on that basis.

However, very few TLD labels are words in specific languages. The
ccTLD labels are deliberately restricted to a list of codes, and of
the few labels in the gTLD 'vocabulary' that actually appear in the
English dictionary, not all are defined there in the sense that the
label is being presented to users.

To be sure, the mnemonic TLD labels are primarily intended to evoke
Anglophone association. Equally certain is that many of the designated
concepts can be evoked using similar mnemonics derived from other
languages. This doesn't mean that every single label will need to
appear in every single language. Much in the same way that INFO has
the same connotation in a number of languages using the Latin script,
there are quite likely to be many mnemonic labels in other scripts
that convey shared meaning across language boundaries.

Locking the discussion onto notions of language may therefore not be
the most useful basis for proceeding. In precisely the same way that
the ICANN IDN Guidelines were recently revised to shift their primary
basis from 'language' to 'script', I suggest that we focus on the
matter from that perspective, as well.

> 2)- Unfortunately English is the default language of the Internet today

Yes, and undecorated Latin is the default script of the DNS. These are
separate issues, and Council has to grasp the distinction.

/Cary