What's in an alphabet?

The US run agency, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), finally seems to be moving forward on the use of non-Latin characters in domain names although it looks at though it will probably take another two years or so before any substantial changes take place.

I am not sure that having Americans in charge of these changes is a good idea. At one point in the not so distant past I was working for an American company, whilst I lived here, on a project to adapt a bespoke IT application for use in Europe. There were two things that they really didn't get and I was assigned the responsibility for their education; as a European-ised Yank it was believed that I would understand their difficulties. These two areas, to which I devoted an unbelievable and frustrating amount of time, were valued added tax (VAT) which I shan't discuss here and the various diacritical marks used in non-English languages. I can remember discussions that went something like this:

Me: "French has five specials characters that we have to allow for: accent acute (´), accent grave (`), circumflex (ˆ), the cedilla (¸) and the diaeresis (¨)."

Them: "Is this really necessary?"

Me: "Would you have put this system into the states without including the letter 'a'?"

Them: "But that's a real letter?"

Me: "Sigh."

Them: "Can't we just spell these words and names in a different way?"

Me: "Sigh."

I finally convinced them but only at a high personal cost to me and the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol after these phone calls. It didn't help that this happened roughly simultaneously with the Great German Spelling Reform of 1998. You can well imagine how the conversations related to the legality of spelling went.

So I am not sure that Americans in general get the importance of the use of one's own language and alphabet is to others acroos the globe. Maybe someone should nudge them a bit and hurry them along.