[discuss] Possible approaches to solving "problem no. 1"

Fri Feb 21 01:07:48 UTC 2014

On 21/02/2014 13:24, Michel Gauthier wrote:
> Brian,
> 
> the orthogonal meaning difference is between the American language and
> the French language. We translate American "global" as "mondial", 

I don't possess a current American dictionary, but my grandfather's
Webster (I am not joking) defines "global" as "spherical; pertaining
to the globe, or earth." Merriam-Webster on line gives two definitions:

": involving the entire world"

": involving all of something and especially a computer system, file, etc."

It is of course the second meaning that applies in the Internet
technical context. I can see where the confusion comes from. But
it is a confusion. When we geeks speak of "globally unique names"
we are not speaking of the world. We might equally speak of
"universally unique names" and mean exactly the same thing. Actually
it would be sufficient to say simply "unique names".

> and
> "globalization" as "mondialization". This is why we are interested by
> the way your newspapers translate the US globalization? How do you
> understand the Unicode "globalization" 

I don't. What I understand about Unicode is that it is a generally
agreed way of representing coded character sets in computers, and that
because of the complexity of the problem, Unicode includes some
compromises (the most famous being the CJK compromise). Since there
are some compromises, by definition not everyone is happy.

> and the normative
> internationalization.

I think that I18N is a bad choice of word (we don't even agree how
to spell it) but it's too late to change it now. Apart from that,
as far as I'm concerned the *principle* was settled long ago:

  "This report recommends the use of ISO 10646 as the default Coded
   Character Set, and UTF-8 as the default Character Encoding Scheme in
   the creation of new protocols or new version of old protocols which
   transmit text." (RFC2130)

As others know much better than me, there are many practical issues
in implementing that principle, but from the technical protocol
design view, we don't "internationalise" the network (it's been
international since 1973, anyway). All we do is make protocols
capable of operating in multiple character sets.

> We are friednly to the US but we are not interested in an US globalization.

I don't think that's relevant to Ig.

    Brian

> 
> M G
> 
> At 23:48 20/02/2014, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> 
>> On 21/02/2014 10:56, Ian Peter wrote:
>> > the word globalisation has different meanings to different people
>> and I refer you to the anti-globalisation  movement, which sees
>> globalisation as a word for transnational corporate control without
>> government regulation (and you can see the ramifications of that in an
>> internet setting in terms of economic dominance). Probably not the
>> most sensitive word for ICANN to use given its connotations to many
>> people, but I'm not sure what the best substitute is.
>>
>> It's certainly true that the word has been contaminated by the
>> "anti-globalization" lobby, but I looked in my Shorter Oxford
>> and it says that "global" means "pertaining to or embracing the
>> totality of a group of items, categories or the like."
>> As far as I can tell that's the same as the French meaning,
>> which is "considered in its entirety" (my translation of the
>> definition in Le Petit Larousse). Neither of them defines "global"
>> to have anything to do with the globe of the Earth.
>>
>> For the francophones here, my Robert is very strange since it
>> is asymmetric:
>>
>> global (En) = universel, mondial, planétaire (Fr)
>> global (Fr) = global, total, overall, aggregate, comprehensive (En)
>>
>> The English to French translation is simply wrong, according
>> to the Oxford definition. Certainly in the Internet standards
>> world, when we say "global" we are not thinking about the
>> globe of the Earth.
>>
>>      Brian
>>
>> > From: Michel Gauthier
>> > Sent: Friday, February 21, 2014 8:18 AM
>> > To: John Curran ; Louis Pouzin (well)
>> > Cc: 1Net List
>> > Subject: Re: [discuss] Possible approaches to solving "problem no. 1"
>> >
>> > At 20:43 20/02/2014, John Curran wrote:
>> >
>> >   On Feb 20, 2014, at 2:24 PM, Louis Pouzin (well) <pouzin at well.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >     Global(ization) mentioned 25 times, i.e. USG/NSA control.
>> >
>> >   Louis -
>> >       For those us not quite as astute, could you unpack the above a
>> little bit,
>> >      (In particular, I'm trying to figure the how use of global
>> implies USG control)
>> >
>> > Please, not again!
>> > :-)
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
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> 