Re: Global and national e-mail address

I will here comment several comments frpm John C Klensin, Adan M Costello
and others.

With this topic I did not want to talk about replacing ASCII with ISO 8859-1
or about what character encoding to use. Instead I wanted to discuss
what names could be suitable to use as a global fallback name.

To be able to write a name you need, at least, to be able to have letters
so you can write all phonemes used. ASCII only contains 26 letters and they
cannot represent all phonemes very well. For example, Swedish have
three vowals in addition to the ones available in ASCII. They are
represented by the letters "åäö". These are letters, not an "a" or "o"
with an accent above. Without those three letters you cannot write all
Swedish names. Accents I can live without, but not the letters for our
additional phonemes.

To be able to write most names in the world I think you need to be able to
write about 60 phonems. Not everybody need their own letter (English have
about 45 phonems but the 26 letters are enough). So I would expect by adding
not that many more letters to the ones in ASCII we could get a quite faire
representation of all names in the world. That would be more acceptible 
to have on a business card.

And just like Adam my Swedish keyboard do not have any accented or diacritic
letters. But I can still type quite a lot of them by using "compose" or
"alt graph".

ASCII will never be good enough for use as a "global" name for Swedish.
But with a few more letters added it would be possible. I expect the same