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Who needs the Latin alphabet anyways?

Written by Jonathan on October 30th, 2009

Yesterday I was reading about the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, saying that in five years Chinese will dominate internet content.  Then it turns out that today is the 40th anniversary of the internet and that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, will soon allow domain names to be written in scripts other than the Latin alphabet.  So that means instead of writing Google.cn we will get to write www.谷歌.cn (or will it be www.谷歌.中国?), and let’s not forget about Cyrillic, Arabic, Korean, Thai, and all the other written languages that make human civilization awesome.  I’m so pumped for this.  It’s going to be that much more incentive for American kids to learn a foreign language, especially if most of the internet will be written in 汉字 anyway.

 

Posted in Internet, Learning Chinese |
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1 Comments so far ↓

  1. Aaron says:
    November 23, 2009 at 6:57 pm

    Actually non-ASCII host names have been allowed for quite some time now. It’s only the top-level domain (.com, etc.) that has changed.

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