languages and semantics

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

It's hard to pick names that work across large numbers of human languages.
I just came across a website with this name on it:

    Sheetal V. Kakkad 

As many of you know, the word "shit" is pronounced "sheet" in chicano
English dialects widely used in the USA. This dialect has also adopted the
word "caca", meaning "shit", from Spanish and it is pronounced "kaka".

And in case you don't realize how subtle this can be, let's say we decide
to try and use words with a Latin root. GM did this when choosing the name
for a new car model a number of years ago. I'm sure they even
double-checked the name "Nova" with native Spanish speakers and received a
thumbs-up. But the problem is that Hispanic radio announcers, DJ's and the
people who do voice-overs for commercials have a certain way of speaking
that puts the emphasis on the last syllable of a phrase so that when they
said something like "Here's the Chevy Nova!", instead of putting the
stress on the first syllable of "Nova" it ended up on the last and the
phrase sounded like "Mira el Chevy no va!" Which means "Look, the Chevy
doesn't run!".

We could always decide to use English as our Lingua Franca but that might
lead us to choose .GIFT as a TLD. But this wouldn't be very popular in the
several German speaking countries except among heavy metal death rock
bands because "Gift" is the German word for "poison". No doubt English
speaking bands would demand the .POISON TLD for parity and some French
fish packing companies, awash in the sea of Internet acronyms,
abbreviations and misspellings, would choose to register there since
it's only one letter short of "poisson", the French word for fish.

Well, maybe we could be accomodating. The Spanish word for network is "la
red" so why not have a .RED TLD and maybe English speaking people will
find some use for it, hopefully not a red-light district though. And the
French word for network is "le reseau" so let's create the .RES TLD and
maybe some political and legal types who remember the Latin origins of
"republic = res publica" will find a use for it as well. In Russian and
Ukrainian, network is "set'" but if it were written in the Cyrillic
alphabet used by those languages it would appear as CET. So let's make
that one as well and the lovers of whales and other cetaceans will no
doubt also be pleased. 

The French word for a spider's web is "la toile"  so let's create a .TOIL
TLD for them and for all the hard working anglophones who have sweated so
hard and shed so many tears and created so much bad blood on this mailing
list. The German word for web is "das Gewebe" so let's also have a .GEW
TLD for them and for the people who want to display their useless gew-gaws
on the web and for all those illiterate white power folks who can't spell
properly yet. In Italian, spider's web is "la ragnatela" so we could have
a .RAG TLD and make Italy happy as well as the high fashion houses of
Paris and everyone else in the rag-trade world-wide.

To paraphrase a famous American president of the Civil War era, "You can
please all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of
the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time". And
lest you Brits think I'm ignoring your famous politicians, I've included 
a famous quote from Sir Winston Churchill in the above message, woven
together with everything else in the spirit of those British style
crosswords with the exceedingly cryptic clues.

Happy New Year.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com