LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM: pinyin

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Sat Aug 2 03:15:59 CEST 2008


CE Whitehead wrote:

> Hi, I am not sure that the purpose of my email was to describe the 
> correct use of suppress script but rather was to say that I felt 
> zh-Latn was probably the best prefix as suppress-script (correct me if 
> I am wrong) could not be used with a variant subtag to indicate the 
> script.

You don't "use" Suppress-Script in a language tag.  You either use a 
script subtag as part of your tag, or you do not, and if the content 
being tagged is written in the script identified in the LSR as the 
Suppress-Script for that language, then under most circumstances, it is 
best not to use the script subtag.

> I still support zh-Latn as the prefix; I agree with Addison that 
> multiple prefixes are possible, and I am not wholly against allowing 
> multiple--it adds nothing to the distinction between the two 
> Romanizations to say that the prefix is zh-Latn as the prefix for both 
> is zh-Latn.

Whatever the prefix/es is/are for 'pinyin', they should be the same for 
'wadegile'.  So nothing about the script subtag, or absence of such, 
adds anything to the distinction between Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles --  
that's presumably why Mark wants the variants.

>>> The solution would be to use suppress-script except that that is 
>>> used only for language subtags, not for variant subtags.
>>>
>>> A suppress-script for the language part of the tag, zh , that would 
>>> work here--because Latin is clearly not the default script for zh.
>>
> This is not an accurate depiction of the purpose or use of 
> Suppress-Script.
>
> Oops. I thought suppress-script was used for the most commonly used 
> script on the internet--so that that script subtag could optionally be 
> omitted from the tag and still understood to be the script.

That's correct, although not necessarily "on the Internet."  What I 
didn't understand was what the presence or absence of a Suppress-Script 
for Chinese has to do with using the script subtag 'Latn' in the Prefix 
field for these variants.  Obviously if a language has romanizations, 
then it would not have a Suppress-Script of 'Latn'.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ



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