LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM (R3): pinyin

Kent Karlsson kent.karlsson14 at comhem.se
Tue Sep 9 00:48:25 CEST 2008


> Michael Everson wrote:
> > How about zh-Latn- for now, that can't be wrong.
> 
> Except that it excludes Tibetan and other languages. Yesterday Peter  
> said that Tibetan Pinyin should register its own subtag.
...
> Whether or not the intent of the subtag was for Mandarin, it 
> is wrong  
> to limit the use of the subtag by restricting it to zh- or 
> zh-Latn or  
> zh-cmn- or zh-cmn-Latn since that would appear to exclude other  
> languages. Since bo-pinyin or bo-Latn-pinyin would be equally 
> correct,  
> it appears that pinyin is indeed analogous to fonipa and fonupa: a  
> Latin orthography which can be applied to more than one language.
> 
> I'm also not willing to gamble that Wade-Giles was never used 
> for any  
> language in addition to Mandarin.
> 
> Accordingly, I believe that the best course of action is *not* to  
> specify a prefix.
> 
> Type: variant
> Subtag: pinyin
> Description: Pinyin romanization of Chinese. This is primarily  
> Mandarin Chinese (where the prefixes zh- and/or zh-Latn- may 
> be used);  
> other languages may also use this subtag, with or without -Latn-.

Without (yet) having any opinion on the appropriateness of using
the variant subtag "pinyin" to Tibetan, it should be noted that
one can have multiple Prefixes lines or add prefixes to a registration
record (or even later remove *all* Prefixe lines, all in one go, not
piecemeal; but which I do not find appropriate in this case).

So in principle one can have:
Type: variant
Subtag: pinyin
Prefix: zh-Latn
Prefix: bo-Latn

> Compare:
> 
> Type: variant
> Subtag: fonipa
> Description: International Phonetic Alphabet

I agree with Peter and others that this is a false analogy.

> I trust that this compromise will prove satisfactory.

I would not think so.

	/kent k



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