
.cymru
While .cymru may have a use for Welsh language websites I fear it's going to get very confusing with all these new TLDs. .Wales is cumbersome and long most people will still continue to just type .com or .co.uk
Wales is to get two new top-level internet domains – one for Welsh speakers and one for the rest of us – under a deal announced yesterday between the Welsh government and .uk registry Nominet. The move to apply for both .wales and .cymru sidesteps criticism that the Welsh government was planning to abandon the Welsh language …
Not a fan of all these new tlds either, It will make branding and advertising URLs a lot harder. I think you're right, things will get more confusing for your average user.
But to be fair .wales is the same amount of characters as .co.uk, so I don't think "cumbersome and long" is a valid argument.
That's the problem with new TLDsin a nutshell. We already got a raft of new, worthless gTLDs... rubbish like 'museum' and 'biz' and 'info' and 'name' that no-one really cares about or uses. Even ccTLDs didn't remove the general desire for .com domains; this new gimmick isn't going to be any different.
... and those of us worried by that will simply buy both domains and redirect .co.uk to .cymru or .wales or whatever.
As long as it's the new tld that gets bookmarked and used in links, by the end of the first year you could probably drop the .co.uk and save the few pounds a year it's costing you.
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1484304.html
Pam dach chi'n meddwl bod enw gwahanol ar y wlad yn y de? Mae'r gair ei hun yn treiglo llawn cymaint ta waeth fyddai'ch tafodiaith.
[Why do you think the county's name varies between north and south? The word itself mutates in the same way whatever your dialect is]
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1484304.html
Gymru is a soft mutation of Cymru. On the Welcome to Wales sign it is written as Croseo i Gymru because the 'i' causes a soft mutation changing the C to a G. The C can also change to a Ch or Ngh depending on the type the mutation needed.
Lloegr a Chymru - England and Wales
Yng Nhgymru - In Wales
This can cause problems sometimes. A friend of mine worked on a project where somebody had created some promotional material including a logo based on the word Pontardawe. Unfortunately when they wanted to use that logo to generally replace the word Pontardawe on one poster they couldn't because 'In Pontardawe' in Welsh is 'Ym Mhontardawe' so it didn't work.
Wikipaedia is oftern 'inaccurate; and so once again it proves to be.
A quick history lessong for you.
Prior 1066 there were simply regions and lords ruling [what is now known as] the UK.
Wales at this point was no more a country than England.
When the Normans came along, they started to exert control of Mercia /England.
Edward i then conquered the regions to the west of England [the bit known as wales] but as this area was still ruled by regional lords, wales at ths point was still not a country.
Edward consulidated this and built castles to control the place.
There were two unions with wales / England, one in the 13th century and another in the 16th.
It was the second that gave added the laws of England to all of the regions of wales, effectvly unifying wales as one place and becoming 'part' of England, as a principlity.
Unless I am very much mistaken, at no point from then has wales gained any sort of independance and, although it may not be popularly understood, wales is not a country.
Playing football, or rugby or having a dialect [like, say Yorkshire or Lancashire] does not make it a country.
And just because wikipaedia uses the term "Countries of the United Kingdom" int he title does not make it accurate; just flawed.
On the other hand, it has rather more autonomy than Yorkshire, so it is conceivable (though not very) that people browsing the web might need to know that a site is Welsh rather than English.
These two are the least unreasonable gTLD proposals that I've read about so far, but that's not saying much.
I don't mean to 'diss' Wales, but those thinking that the .wales TLD will help the country's international profile better than .cymru should realise that many people outside the UK have never even heard of Wales, never mind know where the hell it is.
And, where they have heard of it, they often think it's a town in England.
Sad but true.
Where is the business case for this? Almost £400,000 of public money will be going to ICANN to set up the domains, and then countless thousands of pounds of private money from Welsh businesses flowing in to the hands of Nominet every year in order to defensively register in the .wales and .cymru domains. How much of extra business do they think those domains will pull in? Pence?