back to article China domain name land grab about to start

Domain names ending with .中国 – the Chinese characters for China – will become available in mid-October and China is gearing up for the rush of expected applications. The addition of the .中国 top level domain is a result of ICANN's decision to add top level domains that don't use Latin script. When announced last January ICANN …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    China also claims 415 instant messaging users?

    god help us

  2. jake Silver badge

    Whatever.

    I have all of China's IP space dropped on the floor. Nothing useful there.

    1. Wheaty73

      Re: Whatever.

      That's OK, they probably have half the western IP ranges blocked for the same reason.

  3. Christian Berger

    How popular will that be?

    Have you ever seen a Chinese type? They typically type in the transliteration of the character they want, and then select from several ones with the same transliteration. I don't think 中国 is easier for them to type then cn.

    1. Wheaty73

      Re: How popular will that be?

      dot - zhong guo or dot cn... Hmmm, good point. Can think of several companies that will need this though just in case.

      It is most likely going to be a marketing thing - seeing http://www.dell.中国 in a magazine advert perhaps.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How popular will that be?

      That's not exactly how they do it. The input method software are smart, they use shortcuts and propose most likely choices first. Some can use context and much more.

      With a basic Chinese IM using pinyin (there are other modes faster than pinyin), you already only need to type "zhg" to get the characters 中国. Since you have to keep in mind that they are most of the time using the Chinese input mode, not a Latin one, then yes, it is easier for them to type.

      And of course, you have to consider the millions of phone users, many of whom do not know the Latin transliteration at all: they use stroke order input, or character recognition. For those ones, it'll be noticeably easier.

  4. frank ly

    In the future ....

    "... addresses typed in the Latin alphabet will continue to reach sites using both .cn and .中国 addresses. "

    It would for those Chinese organisations which take advantage of the privileged upgrade period and for those that take double registration in the future. There will come a time when Chinese organisations (and people) only register .中国 addresses; then the rest of the world will need familiarity with Chinese characters if they want to use the internet to explore and use those sites.

    This will probably happen in other regions too, with Cyrillic and other scripts.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm still wondering....

    How does one type that into the browser without using copy & paste?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm still wondering....

      Ever see a large chinese keyboard?

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Large_chinese_keyboard.jpg

      Luckily this never caught on, so there are other methods they use with smaller keyboards using simplified and pinyin, and an onliine example can be found at http://www.linguanaut.com/chinese_keyboard.htm

      I wouldnt want to have to use one of these, unfortunantly for techs in the webhosting biz, I wonder how long before we have to in order to be able to test for sure if someones domain is working or not.....

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm still wondering....

      Add keyboard for chinese...use the keyboard...type 'zhongguo' press space (中国) your done.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I'm still wondering....

        这是真的!

        1. Qu Dawei
          Thumb Up

          Re: I'm still wondering....

  6. pompurin

    Don't forget the traditional type

    For example 中國 is what the Chinese from Hong Kong and Macau would use. So that's two domain names you need to register.

    I can't see this catching on. The Latin Alphabet/Arab Numerals are ubiquitous so known by everone. As claimed above it is easier for a Chinese user to type .cn than .中国, Most of these will probably just be re-directs to their globally accessible .cn ages.

    The day when I have to code in Chinese or log onto a router and type '显示日志 / show log' is the day English has officially lost it's grip on the world.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      >> the day English has officially lost it's grip on the world

      Sir,

      That sad day has assuredly arrived now, ushered in by your wanton insertion of that spurious apostrophe!

      1. pompurin

        Re: >> the day English has officially lost it's grip on the world

        Damn you're right. Too early in the morning.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: >> the day English has officially lost it's grip on the world

        He typed:

        '显示日志 / show log'

        here it is with additional spaces:

        ' 显 示 日 志 / s h o w l o g '

        So, you assumed that his first quote character was part of the first Chinese character when it wasn't.

        On a different note, I have watched Japanese co-workers type messages in ?Japanese? script and it was 3 to 5 key presses per character. It looked like it would have been easier to send it in Morse.

        1. Wheaty73

          Re: >> the day English has officially lost it's grip on the world

          Each of those "characters" is a word or word-part, not a letter, so MAY contain more information than the equivalent number of characters in English.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: >> the day English has officially lost it's grip on the world

          On a computer at least most people input Japanese via romaji -> hiragana (phonetic script) -> candidate lookup for any kanji/katakana sections of the input..

          i.e. if you want to type Japan you input nihon by pressing the roman letters, the hiragana appears and then on my machine at least you press space and it usually converts it into the right symbols or you get a list of candidates ordered by probability.. once you start teaching the input method the characters you use it gets a lot faster.. So lots of key presses but I think the amount of information encoded by character balances the number of key presses required to input them... for TLDs it's not really worth it as writing out "china" in full doesn't have any benefit over typing in cn and just knowing that cn == china. I'm not sure about the Chinese but a lot of Japanese people have trouble remembering kanji for words they use in daily conversation so I can imagine this becoming a pain when you want to go to a site which you can remember the pronunciation of but you can't remember which kanji is used to write it.

        3. Peter Johnstone
          Stop

          Re: >> the day English has officially lost it's grip on the world

          I think that mongo was actually referring to the incorrect usage of the apostrophe in the word its changing its meaning from possessive form of it (the intended meaning) to 'it is' or 'it has' (the usage of an apostrophe to show possession is incorrect for personal pronouns). For a fuller explanation see: http://www.eng-lang.co.uk/apostrophe_rules.htm. Personally I think that's a bit pedantic even for this site!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The Latin Alphabet ... ubiquitous

      Chinese characters are probably ubiquitous if you live in China --- and an awful lot of the world does.

  7. Peter Johnstone
    Thumb Up

    Impressed

    I'm quite impressed by the number of posts where the submitter has been able to read / write enough 汉字 to be able to include some in their posts. Judging by their English, the posts above do not appear to be written by native Chinese speakers. Well done chaps, 好极了!

    1. Wheaty73

      Re: Impressed

      谢谢你!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        WTF?

        Re: Impressed

        Why is your 'thank you' different from the one above? (Yes, I know no Chinese.)

        1. Peter Johnstone
          Happy

          Re: Impressed

          @theodore

          OK, free starter Chinese lesson:

          In my post I'd written 好极了! (pronounced hao ji le) meaning 'very good'.

          Wheaty73 replied 谢谢你!(pronounced xie xie ni) which you correctly identified as 'thank you'.

          I've replied with the traditional response, 不客气 (pronounced bu ke qi) roughly translates as 'no need to be polite'.

          You'll be fluent in no time!

          1. Qu Dawei
            Headmaster

            Re: Impressed

            做得好! It might also be useful to add: 不耻下问

      2. Peter Johnstone
        Happy

        Re: Impressed

        不客气!

        The moderators are going to have fun with this thread!

  8. Paul Woodhouse

    easy enough using pinyin, would be a much steeper learning curve if it was zhuyin, the wife's from taiwan so I have to set her keyboard up for zhuyin input, I learned Chinese on the mainland though, so I use pinyin... doesn't half cause amusement..

    1. pompurin

      Yes my Mrs also from Taiwan uses the method known as 'BopoMofo'. I had a nightmare trying to set up Zhuyin pinyin, Hanyu Pinyin and diacritic Pinyin along with Simplified and Traditional characters. The last time I was in Taiwan it seemed they were moving slowly over to Hanyu Pinyin to harmonise with the mainland.

    2. Qu Dawei
      Headmaster

      The hardest thing I have had to get used to is the fact that when I change languages on my Win7 machine, the layout of characters on my keyboard changes. I now normally just use the Chinese set up which can handle both, and accept that typing pound signs is a bit more involved.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You bastards! :-)

    Fuckit I so wish I'd paid more attention in school and was genuinely multi-lingual :-(

  10. Guillermo Lo Coco
    Alert

    Divide and conquer !

    Comentards, what do you think:

    Is it necessary to improve the presence of a primitive language like Chinese?

    Or we should move all toqether to english asap ?

  11. Christian Berger

    Horray for UTF-8

    Without which this discussion wouldn't have been possible. :)

    (for our younger readers, there used to be a time when computers had problems with non-english characters, you couldn't write a text file containing Umlauts and expect it to arrive correctly at the other end)

  12. J.G.Harston Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    茶,牛乳,砂糖

    1. Peter Johnstone

      Tea, Milk, Sugar

      哦和咖啡!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    this

    谷歌是你的朋友

    1. Qu Dawei
      Headmaster

      Re: this

      谷歌经常提供中式英语

  14. Guillermo Lo Coco

    Can you imagine a world without USB ? Why do we need so many languages ?

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