Friday 28 April 2017

Computer Science Internationalization - Hieroglyphs in Domain Names

I have been aware for a long time that domains such as .com support many human language scripts. Verisign's .com includes support for Hiragana, Gurmukhi, Han, Tibetan, Sinhala, Devanagari, Hangul and many more.

But what of Verisign's .com equivalents .コム (Japanese) and .닷컴 (Korean)? Both of these support a multitude of human language scripts. The supported scripts for many, but not all, Domains are listed in the IANA Repository of IDN Practices iana.org/domains/idn-tables.

Whilst browsing this repository, I discovered there are sixteen domains, all belonging to Verisign, which support Egyptian Hieroglyphs which I think is totally cool! Verisign's .com, .コム and .닷컴 all support Egyptian Hieroglyphs. This means one can register domain names such as:-

  1. 𓇋𓈖𓏏𓂝𓂋𓈖𓄿𓏏𓇋𓍯𓈖𓄿𓃭.com
  2. 𓇋𓈖𓏏𓂝𓂋𓈖𓄿𓏏𓇋𓍯𓈖𓄿𓃭.コム
  3. 𓇋𓈖𓏏𓂝𓂋𓈖𓄿𓏏𓇋𓍯𓈖𓄿𓃭.닷컴

It is possible you do not have an Egyptian Hieroglyph font on your device so here are the domain names in image format.

Google provide a free Egyptian Hieroglyph font which you can download from google.com/get/noto/

Does the Egyptian Hieroglyph string I have used above mean anything? It is actually a transliteration of the English word international. I used ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/egypt/translator.html for the transliteration. The hieroglyphs translator presents the Egyptian Hieroglyphs as images. So, no simple copy and paste of Egyptian Hieroglyph text. I had to match with the appropriate Unicode characters by visual inspection. I cannot guarantee I made all the correct matches but I think I have them correct.

Here are some registered and live Egyptian Hieroglyph Domain Names egyptianhieroglyphic.com/egypt/egyptian-hieroglyphics/