Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

This short article was spawned by a discussion over at Namepros, whereupon a domainer listed several Greek IDN domains that he owns, seeking the feedback of native Greek speakers.

When one invests in non-ASCII domains (IDN) it is important to be familiar with the culture and habits of that particular nation that uses that language.

Popping open a two-way dictionary e.g. English-Greek / Greek-English is not enough.

It can also lead to misconceptions about what constitutes valid words and phrases, which can make one look like an ignorant idiot.

Most importantly, it can cost you the registration fees for a useless domain.

I will be blunt: don’t waste your time and money on Greek IDN domains.

The reason is simple: on the Internet, most of the time, Greeks don’t type in Greek.

Shocked? Disgusted? Well, so am I.

I love my language. Through several eons of existence, the Greek alphabet and language have evolved from the ancient times and have given birth to Latin, thus producing the range of Western languages, including English.

The problem with modern technology is that it’s adapted differently by different cultures. While e.g. the Chinese live and breathe their own language on the Internet, Greeks prefer to type words phonetically or by visual substitution into what has been known as “Greeklish“.

A while back, I wrote an article on companies that should never do business in Greece, due to their lack of knowledge of the local market’s language and social behavior.

In an nutshell: Greeks – as much as 80% of the urban population – can fully understand English content. When marketed to in English, the comprehension of the mottos, slogans etc. is almost 100%

Due to the proliferation of Greeklish – the use of latin characters to depict Greek words – there is currently no target market for Greek IDN domains. No sane Greek person – domainers excluded – will switch to Greek keyboard, type in a keyword and will switch back to English for the .gr or the .com in order to type in a URL.

The same applies to other electronic devices and popular Internet destinations: texting on cellphones, chatting on IM software, twitter, facebook, portals, forums, search engines, etc. is done mostly in Greeklish when user interaction is required.

Perhaps it’s an inherent “laziness” but it goes back to the days of early Internet and UNIX systems, before Windows 95 – when Greek students abroad could only communicate, type and chat on networks such as IRC using only Latin/English keyboards.

Furthermore, certain words that exist in the dictionary can be outdated or passé versions of modern words currently in use. Even if such a word is valid or in the dictionary, that doesn’t mean that it’s correct or useful to register as an IDN domain.

The existence of the “tonal sign” on Greek words – a slanted tick on top of stressed, intoned vowels (or their left side, when the letter in question is the 1st letter of a capitalized word) complicates matters further:  a stroked IDN domain is different from a non stroked one; you’d have to get both versions if you considered the keyword to be important enough. For the record, the non-toned version of a Greek IDN domain is the same as an all-caps version:

ΑΘΗΝΑ.com and Αθηνα.com (Athens, the city) resolve to the same domain puny code but Αθήνα.com is a different domain name. Not to mention, that Αθηνά.com (Goddess of wisdom, female name) is yet another one.

Confused yet?

I’ll spare you the nostalgia of my Internet experience during the early 90′s for another time; I’ll wrap this up by re-iterating my position on Greek IDN domains one final time: don’t waste your money on them.

English is the number one language used in International commerce, regardless of the actual number of native speakers: The number of Chinese Mandarin speakers surpasses that of native speakers of English around the world – a staggering 845 million versus 345 million for English.

Several dozen other languages are spoken worldwide, one of which is Greek.

Despite its important role in introducing literature, philosophy, science and arts to the so-called Western Civilization, Greek is only spoken by roughly 14 million people worldwide; most of them in Greece, Cyprus and the Greek diaspora around the world.

The use of a non-Latin alphabet by the Greeks has proven to be a challenge throughout the proliferation of computers and the Internet. Although the ISO 639-1 standard now describes the particulars of the Greek language so that Greeks can utilize every major operating system, such as Windows, Linux or OS X the fact remains that quite often Greeks online resort to the use of ‘greeklish’ for communicating with eachother.

Essentially, typing Greek words with their phonetic corresponding combination – or even visual substitute – is the definition of ‘greeklish’. For example, a simple Greek word such as “Αθήνα” for “Athens” can be written as “Athina” in greeklish. Due to the Latin alphabet lacking the letter theta, a visual substitution is often used: the number “8″ – closely resembling a Greek theta – would render “A8ina” as a valid greeklish word.

Things get even more complex due to the lack of a standard for the greeklish use; for example, if we were to utilize visual substitution versus phonetic, “Αθήνα” could easily be written as “A8nva” – using “n” as a Greek eta and “v” as the letter ni (Note: the name of the letter “N” or “ni” is inexplicably scribed as “nu” by the English lexicons.)

Confused yet?

This introduction about how Greeks type words is related to a whole separate issue: when written in greeklish, certain Greek words match other words written in English which have a whole different meaning.

And that’s where the fun begins.

The shorthand of “Muni” for “municipal” is a commonly used word in English. It’s also guaranteed to bring a chuckle to a Greek speaker, simply because it means “pussy” – and not of the feline kind.

In a similar manner, references to “colos” for “co-location services” are bound to be negatively received by a Greek speaker: the word means “ass” – the very one you’re sitting on right now. The same word can be written with a “K” as “kolos” – I am certain that the company behind Kolos.com – a bookstore from Ukraine – would never want to open a department in downtown Athens, Greece.

Finally, I remember walking around Wal-Mart, only to find a fine specimen of failed marketing research. The Kavli brand includes some really tasty crackers but I doubt they’d be bringing them to Greece, where the word is a crude reference to “cock” – not of the rooster kind, mind you.