Variant subtag proposal: ALA-LC romanization of Russian

[John Cowan]

Michael Everson scripsit:

> It would be easy enough to specify the range of use for alalc97 now.

In fact it is not.  My quick count found 120 languages, but the
introduction says "more than 150 languages".  In addition, there are many
romanizations specific to particular orthographies (mentioned by date)
or dialects (mentioned by name), so a correct and complete list would
require many variants to be registered as well.

It's important to note that prefixes are only recommendations.  Having an
exhaustive list of 120 or 160 prefixes does not make nonsensical tags
like en-alalc97 invalid.  In practice, people will tag documents already
known to be in an ALA/LC romanization using this subtag, and will not
apply it to other documents in random romanizations.  So I recommend an
empty Prefix: field.

> Then we specify the range of use for alalc97 now, and explicitly omit
> Japanese since it is already covered.

I'd rather deprecate "heploc" in this case, since it is specific to
the LoC.

> Then alalc09 is only registered for use with the changed (or new)
> languages.

I agree.  At present these are Chinese (like pinyin but without tone
marks), Kurdish, Ladino, Inuktitut (not in '97), Korean, ancient
Greek, and modern Greek (there was a unified Greek table in '97).
See http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html , from which all current
tables ('97 and later) can be downloaded.

-- 
John Cowan    cowan at ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan
Rather than making ill-conceived suggestions for improvement based on
uninformed guesses about established conventions in a field of study with
which familiarity is limited, it is sometimes better to stick to merely
observing the usage and listening to the explanations offered, inserting
only questions as needed to fill in gaps in understanding. --Peter Constable