Variant subtag proposal: ALA-LC romanization of Russian

[Avram Lyon]

Dear ietf-languages,

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com> wrote:
> I would happily accept alalc97 as a generic subtag that caters for all of the romanization tables in the 1997 edition of the ALA-LC Romaniztion Tables. It is a single reference, well-defined.

For my needs, this approach would be sufficient. Indeed, would it be a
workable short-term solution to change my variant subtag request to
the subtag "alalc97", which could be processed on its own merits in
the short term (with only the prefix ru-Latn), then modified to
include other possible prefixes (cs-Latn, tt-Latn, etc.) if the
community so decides?

I also have a slight concern that a broadly defined "alalc97" subtag
would be overlap with existing romanization variants; to draw from the
most recent romanization discussion, text in the LOC Hepburn
romanization of Japanese could be marked as either
jp-Latn-hepburn-heploc or jp-Latn-alalc97. Similarly, if a new set of
ALA-LC romanization tables is released, but it differs only in its
treatment of a few languages, would we then have identical text that
can be marked equally well as ru-Latn-alalc97 or ru-Latn-ala09 ? A
proliferation of applicable variant subtags for given transliterated
texts cannot be a good thing for efficient text processing.

Thank you for your thoughtful discussion so far-- I look forward to
revising my request based on the consensus that I hope will emerge
from this.

Sincerely,

Avram Lyon
Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of California, Los Angeles