Pinyin

[John Cowan]

Randy Presuhn scripsit:

> > Regarding Niall Tracey's concern, I think that if the various orthographies
> > use an almost identical character set,
> 
> uh, -Latn- ?

Clearly "character set" is not used in the standard sense here, but
in a sense like "grapheme-to-phoneme mapping".  (Technically, "Latn"
is not a character set either, but a script that corresponds to a
character repertoire.)

> > it is o.k. to group them together and then provide additional variant
> > subtags for those who seek further differentiation.
> 
> What application or use case is fostered by doing this?

Administrative convenience, basically.  For every relevant langauge
there is a Hanyu-Pinyin-type orthography; rather than devising individual
subtags for all of these, we devise one, which when applied to Chinese
signifies Hanyu Pinyin.

-- 
Take two turkeys, one goose, four               John Cowan
cabbages, but no duck, and mix them             http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
together. After one taste, you'll duck          cowan at ccil.org
soup the rest of your life.
        --Groucho