فلسطين. top-level domain representing the Occupied Palestinian Territory
iana.org
iana.org
Of course, my knowledge of the history of writing extends to a single undergrad course and a quick skim of Wikipedia as a refresher. I'll happily admit I'm wrong if that turns out to be the case.
Anyway, in this context I'm counting 300BCE - 300CE as "very roughly 0CE".
Other alphabets (Greek and Cyrillic) created capital letters in emulation much later (circa 1800's). Most alphabets/sylabaries (Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, etc) don't have upper and lower cases.
Likewise punctuation, which prosidic languages (like English) need to signal stress and emphasis which can transform meaning, but which are also absent from lots of other writing systems.
I think talk of 'more modern' or 'less modern' is nonsense though. Writing is an imperfect representation of speaking, and whatever works is just fine.
Having written code which renders Arabic text, I found “joining” up the letters to be quite simple. It's just a few rules to choose which glyph to display for each character depending on context. The tricky bits, I found, is in integrating a right-to-left script with systems which were made with only left-to-right in mind.
What I usually (not always) found out diring my experiments woth Persian is that the gnu tools themselves deal with it quite fine - but the terminal application shows them at pretty random places. If there is both LTR and RTL in one file, havoc usually ensues.
(persian also has this funny "invisible space", but it causes only small annoyances)
Plan 9 had the courage to shed this cruft by having simple text windows which have a prompt. No curser addressing and no crazy control codes. That makes rendering it just as easy (and beautiful) as rendering text box contents. I wish the Linux desktop environments would follow suit.
We're defending the rights of the oppressed minority against the Jews, and that oppressed minority that unites under the party "conquest" ? Seriously ?
If this is your name, how the hell would you defend the idea that palestinians are just trying to live independantly ?
So, to abbreviate words, you have to think hard about how people will read it. For instance, someone mentioned in another reply "Hamas" and "Fatah". Both these abbreviations read nicely as other words with related meanings. But, how would one abbreviate "Filisteen"?
If you choose the first three letters "Filis", well, that reads like "penny" and is generally used to refer to cheap things - you don't want to use that.
If you use "ft", that would read as "FiTT" فط which just sounds awful in Arabic. (it's not like "fit", the "t" here is heavy/strong).
Actually, "filisteen" is already bad enough: it sounds like "filis" + "TTeen" which is "penny" + "dirt" (we used to make fun of this when we were kids). Though in Palestinian (and the Levant region in general) they pronounce it "falasteen", not "filisteen".
However, I do often hear Unix hackers say "et-sey" when referring to the "etc/" directory because precision is important there: the directory is not named "etcetera" so pronouncing it as such would confuse.
I call /etc/passwd "etsy password".
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/tld-idn-policy-list...
The term "occupied" relates to the fact that they are governed by the Israeli army, and are not self governed by their native inhabitants (the Israeli settlers unlawfully transferred there do vote for the Israeli parliament, and hence are self-governing in a way, as the Israeli army is under the authority of the Israeli government.)
You are missing some of your history lessons: Jordan and Egypt have recsinded any claims to those territories, instead recognizing the Palestinian people as the one who should rule those territories (the same was recognized by the State of Israel in the "Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements" aka Oslo I Accord)
That's exactly my point why those territories aren't occupied. The only way to call them occupied if Egypt or Jordan would still claim their authority over them. But as you said - they don't. Therefore while their status isn't clear, they aren't occupied. I.e. they are not more occupied by "Israeli Civil Authority", as they are occupied by the "Palestinian Authority" (i.e. Fatah and Hamas). At least that's how I view it.
Oslo agreements weren't supported by Arabs (de facto), therefore they are morally void for a long time already. UN might support the idea of "occupied" terminology, but UN isn't the only entity who defines it.
The West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights are all considered occupied territories (by most of the world at least. The State of Israel calls them ``Disputed''. I'm an Israeli citizen, and I must say I disagree with the official stance of my government.)
The fact that some browsers may have font problems, etc. makes me think that countries might want to also have a secondary TLD in latin text. Perhaps they could be mapped to the same domain? I would think that a lot of countries might want this as a local pride issue.
Edit: This affects Mobile Safari on an iPad (iOS 5.1.1).
Even if they use latin script, the name of the country is not always written the same in it's own language vs in English.
But, um, what do the people in Spain speak if not Spanish?
In addition, there are several localized languages, that are not "official" but "recognized": Aragonese (Aragon), Asturian (Asturias), and Leonese (Castile and León).
And there are countless dialects of each.
IE is IrEland because IR is IRan, and Iran comes before Ireland alphabetically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...