Re: Global and national e-mail address

Dan,

Three observations (short this time)...

(i) Computer geeks and their possible preferences aside, people 
tend to not like transliterations (writing of a name that would 
normally be written in one character set in the characters of 
another).  Whether they like "better" transliterations more than 
"worse" transliterations is a cultural issue.

(ii) To reasonably transliterate names and languages, one needs 
not only a collection of the right phonemes, but an appropriate 
and accurate notation for tones.   You can't get those out of a 
small extension to Latin letters.  I'm told that one can get a 
reasonable approximation of all of the relevant phonemes and 
tones with IPA, but IPA not only uses some characters that are 
distinctly non-Latin-based, but also uses a rather complex 
collection of combining diacriticals.  And, at least unless one 
is a professional phonologist, learning IPA and how to use it 
accurately is _hard_ (having had people attempt to teach it to 
me twice, once when I was young enough to learn these things). 
For some hints in a reference that is easily accessible to most 
of us, see the discussion of IPA Characters in the Unicode 
definition (3.0 or 4.0, take your pick).

(iii) If one wants even an approximation to accurate 
transliteration, the symbol-overloading in Latin scripts is bad 
news.  E.g., the sound of "ö" (o with diaresis, U+00F6) is 
different in, e.g., Swedish and German.  I.e., they are