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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

The .cat domain is restricted to Catalan-speaking stuff, but this site still exists. Well played, Internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cat#Restrictions

Poking around, it has a catalan translation, but not a spanish or french translation. https://http.cat/?lang=cat https://http.cat/?lang=es https://http.cat/?lang=fr

Edit: http://nyan.cat/ has a catalan version too (català). Apparently you've been nyaning is has nyanyejat in catalan:

"HAS NYANYEJAT DURANT 117.6 SEGONS Tweet Your Score"

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I'm glad someone else is worried about this. For some reason Catalans are very special and love tlds. For example in BCN one is within the geometric catchment for:

  - .barcelona
  - .cat
  - .es
  - .eu

I don't think any other settlement on earth is so blessed.

For what it's worth, the registrar for .cat (Nominalia) isn't very strict

The status of Catalonia is an enormously controversial issue. In 2017 the government of Catalonia declared independence from Spain, resulting in the Catalonian government being forcibly deposed by the Spanish government, which is opposed to Catalonian independence regardless of the wishes of the Catalonians.

So it's not that surprising they would want their own, .scot is a similar situation.

Except in 2014 Scotland's referendum was to remain in the UK. Scotland is a country too, so it's really quite different.

Scotland is only a "country" by the UK's totally weird definition of the word. It's not that different from Niedersachsen or Alabama or, indeed, Catalonia in that it has its own parliament etc but it's not independent.

In the UK (and in pro football, somehow), "country" appears to mean "either a member of the UN or a federal state of the UK"

If it is a weird definition, it's a well-recognised one. Take the second sentence of the relevant Wikipedia page:

"A country may be an independent sovereign state or part of a larger state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, or a geographic region associated with sets of previously independent or differently associated people with distinct political characteristics." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country

Yes, England's definition of the English word "country" includes Scotland

That's not a weird definition by definition - English is what England defines it to be.

> I don't think any other settlement on earth is so blessed.

AFAIK you can buy them anywhere, but Moscow-related (and other major Russian cities) extensions include:

.RU .SU .MOSCOW .МОСКВА .РУС (Rus) .РФ (Russian Federation)

And with second levels:

MSK.RU MSK.SU

Can you actually still get .su domains?

Absolutely. The Soviet Union may be dormant, but they'll happily give you a domain, presumably it's possible to have a website that's relevant to it after its supposed demise.

It's also in "de facto" use by the CIS[0] successor organisation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Independent_St...

I can think of a locality that is covered by a higher number of geographic gTLDs: Cologne, Germany, has .cologne, .koeln, .nrw, .de, and .eu.

(But, granted, Barcelona actually has .bcn as well.)

> .bcn domain is intended to maintain a relationship of "cooperation and sum of efforts" with the .cat domain

I wanted to learn why this TLD exists but I didn't understand the explanation. What does cooperating with another TLD mean and can I use it for bacon stuff?

Nyan is an Onomatopœia for the sound a cat makes, commonly used in Japan. English usually uses "meow". The catalan word is "mèu".

The "to meow" verb would be "miolar", thus "Nyanyejar" is just "to nyan" turned into a catalan verb, kinda.

nyancats only nyan though...

Even more, I suspect the reading as “nyan” was actually accidental, the onomatopoeia is usually just “nya” if I recall correctly.

Which is easy to understand. The music in the background of the “Nyancat” video is actually produced with UTAU, a sort of offshoot of Vocaloid, the voice synthesis software, using an “UTAUloid” called Momo, with the song being entitled “Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!”. It seems that “Nyan” resulted from parsing it out of the sequential “nya”s.

It’s kind of fascinating how the “poptart cat” gif and the UTAU song somehow ended up merged into this bizarre internet phenomena.

I also wonder if its at least partly (presumably, subconsciously) the adoption of the -an suffix (as adjective marker) from English: note the noun in use is almost always nyan cat / nyancat, so nyan is serving something of an adjectival role.

It's fascinating the wash back and forth across morphologically unrelated languages.

>It seems that “Nyan” resulted from parsing it out of the sequential “nya”s.

"nyanko" is a quite informal word to refer to a cat or kitten. Sorta like a child calling a cat a "meow-meow".

In that sense, is it actually being used as an adjective proper? This is amusing. I would’ve assumed it was just an accident, but it would be more amusing if it was both accidental and “sort of” grammatically correct.

Nyanko is just a name. The usual name for cat is "neko". There's nothing grammatically wrong about using nyanko in place of neko.

Sorry, I meant the “nyan” in “nyanko”, being an adjective. But thinking about it more, the added “n” syllable probably has more to do with phonetics than language semantics. I studied only basic Japanese and now am pretty rusty.

Oh, you thought it was an '-n' adjective. I get it now.

As the onomatopoeia is actually nya or nyaa, and the meme is "nyancat", there could be something to this.

And a NYAN language setting - clever.

I got NaN on iOS Safari:

HAS NYANYEJAT DURANT NaN SEGONS Tweet Your Score

You've NYANED for NaN seconds Tweet Your Score

NYAN NYAN NYAN NaN NYAN Tweet Your Score

So, a website has to have Catalan content in order to be eligible to use .cat? Couldn't someone just hire translators and/or make friends with Catalan-speaking people to translate some English content to Catalan.

I'm pretty sure that is exactly the goal of the rule.

I think they want the person who owns the domain to be Catalan, and since the Spanish government doesn't want Catalonia to be recognized as an independent place, the language used is a proxy for being from there. I think they might try and limit it to people who speak Catalan.

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