Like I just saw a piece of government literature with a short blurb in, say, Korean, with a URL to a Korean language version of the document online. The URL, of course, is “in English.”
That got me wondering about something I never thought before: how quickly do Koreans or Russians or anyone who doesn’t work with the Latin alphabet get the hang of it? It’s practically a required skill to use the internet, but I know from experience how hard it can be to work with a written language that doesn’t resemble your own at all. Is the Latin alphabet just that much smaller and easier than, say, Chinese that it’s no problem for the Chinese reader with no prior exposure to learn how to write a typical URL quickly?
That’s something I’d never thought of before. I’ve never seen a URL written in the Cyrillic, Korean, or Chinese alphabets. Are all URLs written in the Latin alphabet? Or do I just not get out much?
How many Latin letters do they need to learn? Like 26? And you had better believe those are covered in school. The other way around, you would have to work harder if you wanted to learn 4–5k Chinese letters. Korean and Russian will be a lot less work, of course.
While I can’t comment much on the OP’s query since I grew up with English as my main language, I can take a stab at ekedolphin’s questions.
URLs are a subset of URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier), and URIs conform to Internet Standard RFC 3986, which specify that URIs are limited to the US-ASCII character set
However, another standard, the IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier) builds upon the URI protocol by allowing the universal character set, whereupon
Your browser then does the behind-the-scenes work of converting the percent-encoded foreign characters into their native forms that you see on the screen.
For Chinese typing nowadays, it’s common to use a Latin character keyboard that converts pinyin to Chinese characters. Students learn the Latin alphabet in school for use in pinyin as well as for learning English (or other languages).
