Pinyin

[Peter Constable]

In other words, you're response to Tracy is, "There may be a problem with user perception, but if so we can ignore it." That's at least acknowledging the issue he raises, as opposed to Michael's "this is over the top" response, which completely disregards Tracy's concern and comes across to me as bordering on ad hominem.


Peter


-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan at ccil.org]
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 8:52 AM
To: Peter Constable
Cc: Michael Everson; ietflang IETF Languages Discussion
Subject: Re: Pinyin

Peter Constable scripsit:

> Isn't that ignoring the politics of the region? By analogy, suppose
> Hindi orthography were a perfectly sufficient basis for transliterating
> Tamil: that wouldn't mean that Tamil speakers would have no objections
> to tagging their transliterated content "ta-hindi". Maybe "pinyin"
> isn't a problem for speakers of other languages, but I wouldn't want
> to assume that without investigation.

In the case of the Chinese government vs. the minority languags, quantity
has a quality all its own.  These official romanizations may lack many
things, but they don't lack officialness.

--
So they play that [tune] on                     John Cowan
their fascist banjos, eh?                       cowan at ccil.org
        --Great-Souled Sam                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan