[Fwd]: Response to Mark's message]

[Peter_Constable at sil.org]

John Cowan wrote on 04/10/2003 06:23:56 AM:

> Perhaps what is needed is a notion of "script subsets", which would
> include Hans, Hant, and Ipal.  In this way we could clearly discriminate
> between, say, English in ordinary orthography (en) and in IPA
transcription
> (en-ipal).

"Script subsets" may be an appropriate notion. I don't personally feel too
hung up about this level of ontological modelling, though. If we had an ID
Ipal (or, I've been thinking, Lipa) in 15924, I think that would be useful,
even if it was reckoned within the context of that standard to be a "script
variant" rather than a "script subset".

If we were to introduce a notion of "script subset", I do *not* see a need
to define IDs for the subsets corresponding to the inventory used in each
and every language's conventional orthographies -- we don't need Leng,
Lfra, Ldeu, Lesp, etc. We *only* need these things when we need to identify
the marked (less commonly-encountered) cases.

So, for instance, yi-Latn is fine to identify Yiddish in a Latin-based
orthography, and something like yi-Lipa would be appropriate for Yiddish in
IPA transcription. To push the limits on this, if there were a major
orthography reform for Latin-based Yiddish at some point in the future, we
might debate about having a distinction like yi-Lyi2, though a better
alternative might be to simply consider this to have been a spelling
reform, and to use dates similarly to what has been done for German. Thus,
yi-Latn-2062 vs yi-Latn-1930 (or whatever dates might be appropriate).



- Peter


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Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485