Subject: Re: RFC-1345 "mnemonics"

From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 07:48:49 -0400

I have been unhappy with RFC-1345 for many years,
primarily because it purports to be accurate about which letter
is at which code point in which character set encoding (sadly
the document isn't accurate in various details), which has misled
some number of implementers through the years and caused avoidable
interoperability problems, and because it claims to be "international",
when actually it has a very strong bias towards northern European
languages.

Earlier John Klensin suggested:
 > If an offspring of 1345 were defined as having, e.g., only
 > European languages using Roman-derived scripts in scope, then
 > I think there is more than adequate expertise around to review
 > a proposal and sufficient stability to not be affected by Unicode
 > changes, and that there should be no significant issue with IETF
 > sign-off or even standardization.

	If that were undertaken, then think the charter (if any)
and the document need to be made VERY clear that the scope is
only *European* languages (e.g. explicitly excluding other Romanised
languages such as Vietnamese Quoc Ngu [1,2]) -- and only those European
languages that normally have a Romanised script (e.g. not including
Cyrillic script European languages).

	As an example of why the scope needs to be narrowed that way,
RFC-1456 defines the very widely used convention (VIQR) for expressing
Quoc Ngu within the limitations of ISO-646/US-ASCII.  RFC-1345
pretty much botches non-European languages that happen to be
Romanised.  This was raised as an issue with the author of RFC-1345
prior to publication, but the author frankly was not interested
in hearing any non-European inputs.

	Folks who haven't been involved in multi-lingual
computing might not realise quite what a minefield this whole
area is.  Approximately speaking, choices about how to
represent glyphs/letters and how to encode them usually have
some inherent linguistic bias.  People who use languages
that aren't optimally encoded in some representation tend
not to be very happy with the non-optimal encodings their
language might have been given.

Yours,

Ran
[email-masked]

[1] Chu Nom is approximately unused at this point.  I only know of
1 book that has been printed with Chu Nom in my lifetime (obviously
I might have missed some, but it is clear the volume of Chu Nom
publications is remarkably low), and that one was careful also to
include the Quoc Ngu form on adjacent pages so that non-scholars
could read it.  Folks who can read Chinese and are interested in
linguistics might find that book interesting; I'm not sure how many
more would.

[2] http://www.nomfoundation.org

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