Mixing scripts

John C Klensin klensin at jck.com
Sat Dec 23 02:18:40 CET 2006



--On Saturday, 23 December, 2006 09:59 +0900 Soobok Lee
<lsb at lsb.org> wrote:

>...
>> So indeed the same-scripts rule, as explained by Mark, is a
>> generalisation and correction of this already existing (but
>> somewhat flawed) rule. It needs an additional slight
>> modification allowing the "Japn" mix (in one "label"), but
>> IFAIK there is no particular need for any other similar mix
>> (not even for Korean, for instance).
> 
> If you visit http://www.lgtelecom.com/ (#3 mobile telco in
> korea),  please look into the title bar which displays
> "LG(telecom in hangul)". In Korea, latin+hangul is common,
> while CJK+hangul is rare. I can't exclude even the need for
> CJK+hangul label in Korea from those whose like archaic and
> peculiar homepage address.
> For CJK+hangul, confusibility risk is low, even though its
> typing is more  difficult than that of pure hangul label.

Although I feel that it is silly (I have been accused of having
no sense of humor and a worse sense of brand-creation), we have
also seen instances of mixing "e-commerce" with local languages
in several places in the world, yielding business names of
e-<local-script-characters> or e<local-script-characters>.   We
could try to prohibit this at the protocol level, but doing so
would require, IMO, really compelling reasons.  Everyone should
remember that an overly restricted standard that isn't
well-justified will typically just be ignored, leading to
non-interoperable implementations, name space fragmentation, and
other bad things.

    john



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