LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM (R4): pinyin

[Peter Constable]

From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Yury Tarasievich

> On subject of generic tags: from what more experienced people
> said, I was given to understand there can be no generic tags?
> In case it is not so, the /akademia/ seems feasible choice.

Just to be clear, a tag that is intended to mean the general non-Taraskievičian orthographic conventions for Belarusian, including the several minor variants that had occurred over 75 years, is *not* what the "more experienced" people here mean when they talk about generic subtags.

A generic variant subtag is one that denotes some general kind of variation potentially applicable to any language (or, at least, a wide variety of languages) -- things like "western" or "ancient". We have two generic subtags registered to date, "fonipa" and "fonupa"; these were approved as an exception to our conventional preference against generic subtags because they do refer to some very specific forms of linguistic expression; they just happen to be generic because those are systems of writing that can be used for a wide variety of languages.

The subtag "academy" has been a concern because its mnemonic value is seen to be something very generic in nature, in the sense of "generic" I've described here. The string you mention above, "akademia", doesn't come across as mnemonically generic -- at least to English speakers here.



Peter