Variant subtag proposal: ALA-LC romanization of Russian

Randy Presuhn randy_presuhn at mindspring.com
Mon Nov 16 02:24:51 CET 2009


Hi -

> From: "Mark Davis ☕" <mark at macchiato.com>
> To: "Peter Constable" <petercon at microsoft.com>
> Cc: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> Sent: Sunday, November 15, 2009 3:40 PM
> Subject: Re: Variant subtag proposal: ALA-LC romanization of Russian
>
> I agree with the need. But I think we should rethink the naming. We will
> have
>
> ru-Latn-rusloc
>
> But then we'll need Hebrew, and Arabic, and Thai, and... We don't want to
> have
>
> he-Latn-hebloc
> ar-Latn-arabloc
> th-Latn-thailoc
>
> There are a very large number of transliteration schemes, and
> transliteration authorities (by that, I mean any organization that
> establishes one or more transliteration schemes). Encoding both the
> authority and the language into the variant tag will lead to an explosion of
> variants. And it is redundant information; we already know from the other
> components of the above tag that it is a romanization of Russian.
>
> It would be better instead to just encode a single variant tag meaning
> "transliterated according to the LOC". Then we could have:
...

I could support such a proposal only if the "Reference to published description"
section of the application provided appropriately detailed descriptions of each
of the various language transcription/orthographic variants, i.e., in this particular
case, there were references for the Hebrew, Arabic, and Thai romanizations, with
am appropriate list of prefixes.  This is particularly important in cases
where there have been any changes in the transcription scheme(s) used by an
institution.

Since the proposed registration is quite specific, I'd prefer *not* broadening
it to refer to a whole family of transcription / transliteration schemes that
are largely unrelated other than being in use at the same institution.

Randy




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