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Friday December 21, 2007

Yiddish pick for next-gen domain test

by adam wills
l.a. jewish journal

Recently the Internet came one step closer to becoming truly international, at least in terms of relaxing the vise grip of English as the dominant navigational language. And it did so with the help of the unlikeliest of languages: Yiddish.

“Yiddish uses markings that are not used in Hebrew writing,” said Tina Dam, international domain names director with the Marina del Rey, Calif.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

In choosing Yiddish, the organization is testing the system “as far out as we can, as complicated as it can be,” she said.

When engineers first came up with the domain name system in the 1980s, they adopted the United States’ ASCII characters, a code set based on the English alphabet, with upper and lower case letters, as well as the numbers 0 through nine, the dot and the hyphen.

“They probably didn’t anticipate the Internet to be a global functionality as it is today,” Dam said.

ICANN, which assigns domain names and IP addresses, has come under fire in recent years from countries complaining that Internet domain names should be more inclusive of other writing systems. Out of more than 6,000 spoken languages in the world, 2,261 have a writing system.

In 2003, ICANN established a system whereby an individual or company could register a second-level domain in a language other than English, but you still had to switch back to the U.S. ASCII to write the top level.

As an alternative, ICANN launched a system whereby servers also recognize internationalized labels in the second and top level of a domain name. Yiddish was among the 11 different writing systems tested because of its right-to-left nature and its orthography, which includes vowels. Other languages being tested include Arabic, Greek and Tamil.

The request to include Yiddish came not from Jews, but from Sweden. “Yiddish is considered a formal minority language in Sweden, and the Swedish registry operator had implemented Yiddish [as a second level],” Dam said.

The Yiddish and other domains are not yet available for registration, Dam noted, adding that those responsible for formulating allocation plans need time to work out the logistics. She expects the new domains to be available by mid-2008 at the earliest, at which point other languages will have been added.

“As soon as we’re done with the test, the shop will be open for any language at the top level, as long as the technology supports it,” she said.

To view the ICANN public test site, visit http://idn.icann.org.

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