Variant subtag proposal: ALA-LC romanization of Russian

[Rebecca S Guenther]

We have recognized a need to standardize references to transliteration schemes, but there have not been any standards under development to do this. This would be a step in that direction.
The Library of Congress maintains an XML bibliographic format called MODS (www.loc.gov/standards/mods) that has an attribute that specifies the romanization scheme used in metadata, because there is a need to give such information, but the lack of such a standard has limited its use.
I would agree that a more general approach, just naming the ALA-LC transliteration scheme would be most appropriate. That is how people commonly know it anyhow-- it has long been used in the bibliographic community.

Rebecca

Rebecca S. Guenther                                                       
Senior Networking and Standards Specialist                  
Network Development and MARC Standards Office     
Library of Congress   
101 Independence Ave. SE                                                                                      
Washington, DC 20540-4402                                          
(202) 707-5092 (voice)    
(202) 707-0115 (FAX)           
 rgue at loc.gov

>>> Mark Davis * <mark at macchiato.com> 11/15/2009 6:40 PM >>>
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:

ru-Latn-trloc
he-Latn-trloc
etc.

ru-Latn-trcldr
he-Latn-trcldr
etc.

en-Cyrl-trgost
ja-Cyrl-trgost
etc.

Speaking from a CLDR viewpoint, that would enable effective translation of
the variant tags, since we wouldn't have to have tables of translations of
redundant information.

Mark


On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 13:34, Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft.com>wrote:

> Looks like a well-formed request, and seems like it would be useful.
>
> Peter
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:
> ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Avram Lyon
> Sent: Saturday, November 14, 2009 9:07 PM
> To: ietf-languages at iana.org 
> Subject: Variant subtag proposal: ALA-LC romanization of Russian
>
> Dear members of the ietf-languages mailing list,
>
> I would like to propose a new variant subtag for the Library of Congress
> romanization of Russian, described below. Per the requirements of RFC 4646,
> section 3.5, I am submitting it first to this list for community review.
>
> In proposing this, I realize that perhaps it would be more appropriate to
> add the entire ALA-LC Romanization as a variant applicable to a larger set
> of languages. If so, then perhaps this subtag request should be modified to
> that end.
>
> I look forward to the feedback of the community.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Avram Lyon
> Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures University of California, Los
> Angeles
>
> LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM
>  1. Name of requester: Avram Lyon
>  2. E-mail address of requester: ajlyon at ucla.edu 
>  3. Record Requested:
>
>     Type: variant
>     Subtag: rusloc
>     Description: ALA-LC Romanization of Russian
>     Prefix: ru-Latn
>     Comments: Romanization of Russian recommended by the American Library
> Association and the Library of Congress for bibliographic and scholarly use.
>
>  4. Intended meaning of the subtag:
> This variant subtag is intended to apply to Russian text presented in the
> Library of Congress romanization, widely used in English-language academic
> works that discuss or employ Russian-language sources.
>
>  5. Reference to published description
>     of the language (book or article):
> American Library Association and Library of Congress. 1997. "Russian".
> ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts.
> http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html and
> http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/russian.pdf .
>
>  6. Any other relevant information:
> This romanization is used by leading journals in American Slavic studies,
> including _The Slavic Review_
> (http://www.slavicreview.illinois.edu/info/manuscripts.html) and _Slavic
> and Eastern European Journal_ (http://www.aatseel.org/contributor_info).
> It is also the primary romanization for Russian used in United States
> library catalogs and at the British Library.
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