A person of letters
One of the bothers of being a semi-literate NDN and being professionally engaged in I/O (and store and all the little bits between I and O) and being involved with "internationalization" (i18n in the trade), which really amounts to forensic software architectural review of the debris left by various encoding schemes as the per-bit price of memory dropped, and as the organization of bits converged towards the 8-bit-byte, is the common one of being taken for the spokesperson of all NDNz.
This week I'm saving Algonquin romanized wrting, that is, the use of the "ou" ligature, or alternately, the numeral "8", to prepresent a sound also represented by the "w" character (which wasn't present in French orthography when latinate script was adopted by Wabanakis co-existing with "New France", and the Cherokee script and the Northern Syllabic scripts (sometimes called Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics).
I'm personally happy with dumping the symbol for some mythical creature central to the cult that props up euro-centricism from the set of characters that can be used to form domain names.
More interesting is the technical question of whether the full-stop (a small "x") should be allowed, or if, as it is a punctuation mark, it should not be, under the general premise that the punctuation marks of all scripts are disallowed within domain names, with the sole exception of the ASCII period ".", which actually is a label separation symbol.
Being the all-knowing Oz, I've decided that the syllabic full-stop shouldn't be allowed in domain names.
And Yes Virginia, because some (modified for typeset) Tsalagi glyphs look like Roman glyphs, there are scads of pipples who think Cherokee is bad-for-the-net (the "confusingly similar" argument). I seem to be winning, but it really is my slender shoulders this load of text rests upon.
I'm still tempted to apply for this sequence of characters as a top-level domain. It has the amusing property of being "confusingly similar", but only to itself, that is, they way Tsa-la-gi is written in ASCII is "CWY". Damn! I just realized I missed today's online Cherokee class. Damn! Damn! Damn! Work should not get in the way of life!!!
