wadegile and pinyin LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORMs

[John Cowan]

Broome, Karen scripsit:

> Right. So should zh-wadegile and zh-pinyin, if registered, be deprecated
> on birth of RFC 4646bis? Or would we be better served by suggesting
> that Mark use a private extension until the "cmn" tag is added?

I'd say no to both.

First of all, there's no way to deprecate a prefix.  And "zh" does include
Mandarin, after all; it just isn't limited to Mandarin.  Similarly, we
write en-boont, not en-US-boont, though there is no Boontling variant
of any other regional variety of English.

> In my mind, the last thing we need is more choices for Chinese
> languages. I believe these tags have potential use in my industry to
> represent the names of Chinese actors and Chinese work titles with
> applications, contracts, internal search mechanisms, and users that
> cannot handle zh/cmn characters. As you know, I have a strong need
> to distinguish audio and written variants (and written Cantonese and
> Mandarin), so the "zh" tag is not a good choice for me.

I have no trouble adding "cmn" as an alternative to "zh" after 4646bis
passes.  There is a business need for this distinction right now,
unfortunately.

-- 
John Cowan      cowan at ccil.org        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        Is it not written, "That which is written, is written"?