Wondering where to jump in, and towards the end of this message seems best, but
I have read the whole thread up to date:
On 03-Nov-25 05:12, John C Klensin wrote:
--On Sunday, November 2, 2025 15:29 +0000 Paul Hoffman
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Nov 2, 2025, at 10:17, Pete Resnick
<[email protected]> wrote:
[Hatless]
I'll give an even more likely example than John's: If some kind
person at Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. gave their company name in
Han characters as "华为技术有限公司", though I would find
a Latin script equivalent of the Pinyin version including tone
marks, "Huáwéi Jìshù Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī" helpful, because I
like getting the pronunciation right, I imagine most people would
not. I think ASCII-only (and perhaps English translation) is
really what we're looking for.
Do you want a must-be-ASCII policy just for the company name, or
also for author names?
[author hat]
Specific wording for the draft would be preferred over examples.
I don't know if we are back to "ASCII only" in the "interpretation
string, and can't tell Pete's preference from his example. If we are
going that way, I'll leave to to others to propose text. If,
instead, we don't believe an ASCII restriction there is appropriate
(with Pete's example serving as an illustration of why some non-ASCII
characters may be needed if a phonetic interpretation is intended, I
believe fairly specific wording on the two separate issues here, with
two variations on one of them, has already been proposed:
(1) Martin's suggestion to eliminate the distinction between personal
names and company/geographic names. The differences are not as great
as the document implies and Pete's example shows. If his comments
were not specific enough, that could be done by dropping the second
paragraph of 3.1 and inserting ", or associated company or geographic
names," after the first occurrence of "names" in the first sentence
of 3.1, although I think you can come up with better ways to
accomplish that.
(2) Martin's suggestion was to replace "ASCII' with "Latin script".
Pete's example illustrates, IMO, the importance of that. In the part
of my note Pete did not quote, II expressed some concern about that
because "Latin script" may be over-broad and allow reasonable people,
acting in good faith to create far more problematic strings than the
use of diacritical markings as tone marks that Pete suggested.
Indeed. And in my opinion, no amount of wordsmithing in a policy
document can specify what the RPC should do in enough detail, so we
have to stay at a general level and be explicit that the RPC has the
final say (in the case of failed negotiation with the authors).
And at the general level, I think what we can say is
"Proper names in a non-Latin script, or in a Latin script including
unusual characters, should be accompanied by an equivalent in
normal Latin script. The RPC makes the final decision about the
Latin script version to be used."
[So we don't have to discuss here what's 'normal' or 'unusual'.]
Note that "proper names" covers both people and companies.
Brian
So,
as a variation on "Latin script", my note suggested several ways to
narrow that range of characters, either specifically or by explicitly
delegating authority to limit the characters used to the RPC, a
delegation that phrases like "policy should be that authors'
preferences for display of their names be honored" seem to negate
and, while "included at the discretion of the author and the RPC"
give the RPC authority over whether the interpretations should be
included or not, they also seen to remove RPC discretion over what
those interpretations should be (and what characters are allowed in
them) if the decision is made to include them..
john
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