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Understanding Character Variants |
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Character Variant Issues - Categories of Variants
Different thought leaders articulating the
scope for the variant phenomenon have produced several white papers.
Generally speaking, variants have been classified into four different
categories:
- Character Variants - variants created by character-by-character
substitution. There is no context of language to determine the appropriateness
of the relationship.
- Orthographic
Variants - variants created by spelling variations within a language.
For example in English, there is "color" and "colour".
- Lexemic
Variants - variants created by synonyms within a language. For example
in English, "apartment" and "flat" have the same
meaning.
- Contextual
Variants - variants created by homonyms within a language. For
example in English, "plane" and "plain" have the
same sound but different meanings.
VeriSign is addressing
character variants in its Character
Variant Solution. VeriSign has opted not to address the other
types of variants. We do not believe it would be appropriate to address
these types of variants because VeriSign is not equipped to make the
difficult linguistic judgments that would be required. Nor do we believe
that addressing these types of variants is essential to deliver a robust
character variant solution that will enable users to navigate the Internet
in their own languages.
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