LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM: pinyin
Randy Presuhn
randy_presuhn at mindspring.com
Sun Aug 3 16:58:00 CEST 2008
Hi -
> From: "Kent Karlsson" <kent.karlsson14 at comhem.se>
> To: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> Sent: Sunday, August 03, 2008 3:06 AM
> Subject: RE: LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM: pinyin
...
> > As mentioned earlier, while Pinyin is used primarily and overwhelmingly
> > for Mandarin Chinese, it does have use for other languages.
>
> For instance Cantonese: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Cantonese_Pinyin.
This is *NOT* the same orthography. It's not even terribly similar - it's
about like saying that English and Swedish share a common orthography.
The Pinyin in the registration request is optimized to the phonology
of Mandarin. It only provides for four tones (+ neutral), and is consequently
ill-suited to languages like Cantonese that have more elaborate tone systems.
Randy
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