On Jun 23, 2011, at 1:46 PM, Nadya Morozova wrote:

By the way, in Russian, there’s a similar glottal stop situation with the old character Yer or Hard Sign, ъ, often replaced by an apostrophe in modern Russian. No other language using Cyrillic alphabet has this character except Bulgarian, where it denotes a specific sound. For Russian IDNs, should the spelling with no Yer be a variant of the spelling with it, and vice versa? There are a number of other characters in Russian that are somehow “special”, including the mentioned Ё or characters that in some fonts may be confusingly similar to other letters. In some cases, it is not reasonable to treat these similarities as variants; instead, the confusion can be avoided prohibiting registration of names that can be confusingly similar to a canonical string that has already been registered.

Excuse me Nadya, but as native Russian (and Ukrainian) speaker I beg to differ - apostrophe is not a character of Russian aphabet

(although it is one for Ukrainian), and spelling with "trailing hard sign" was not used in Soviet Union, and now Russia, since 1917.

Hard sign is used as a letter in several Russian words as a glottal stop indeed (unlike in Bulgarian, where it is a vowel character.)

Should we also consider variants of orphography in century-old use - or minor (poetic) uses? (example for Russian: черный / чорный).

A side note on Ukrainian while I am on it - the apostrophe is not a "real" Unicode character and does not exist in uppercase format;

perhaps it can be handled similarly to German eszet (ß) but this is not yet supported (at least, in IDN registrations for UA we don't allow it.)

Perhaps, Vladimir Shadrunov from the .tel Registry could share Telnic’s experiences in defining language policies for Russian and other supported IDN languages in .tel.

This would be very helpful, indeed.