LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM (R4): pinyin

Randy Presuhn randy_presuhn at mindspring.com
Tue Sep 9 22:00:54 CEST 2008


Hi -

>From: Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org>
>Sent: Sep 9, 2008 8:55 AM
>To: ietf-languages at iana.org
>Subject: Re: LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM (R4): pinyin
...
>The question of whether "Pinyin" by itself is commonly used to refer to 
>other romanizations, especially those called "Something-Else Pinyin" as 
>opposed to "Hanyu Pinyin," is really at the heart of the divide between 
>Michael's viewpoint and Randy's (et al.) viewpoint.
...

I look at it a bit differently.  I'm not too concerned with the
string used for the subtag.  What I *am* concerned about is that
the variant is properly specified.  If the variant is Hanyu Pinyin,
it's extremely clear exactly which orthography of which language
is intended.  If we were to go the route of a "generic" pinyin
variant, how would we specify the references for *each* the possible
languages?  This is how this case is quite different from fonipa,
where the broadness / narrowness of the transcription is *not* implied
by the use of the subtag.

Randy


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