Flavors of Hepburn (was Status of Japanese requests)

[Doug Ewell]

CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

>> Yes. I contend that "any romanization of Japanese that fits the
>> Hepburn model better than it fits other models" is a good definition,
>> is reasonably concise, and ought to be used in the registration.
>
> This definition sounds fine, but Doug said not for the description
> field--in the comments maybe??

The Hepburn-related subtags have completed their two-week review period,
have been submitted to IANA, and have been added to the Registry.  See
http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry .

New registration forms can be submitted to this list if it is felt that 
users, upon finding one subtag for "Hepburn romanization" and another 
for "Hepburn romanization, Library of Congress method," the second of 
which takes the first as part of its Prefix, will still be incapable of 
understanding that the first is intended to be general.

> I don't think it's completely clear that [kunrei] should not be 
> registered as it is  well enough defined--I agree with Randy that we 
> don't need to build a perfect tree here --that would be impossible; if 
> we saw at a later date that the [kunrei] subtag should have as its 
> prefix some other subtag in addition  [ja-Latn] we would need to 
> deprecate [kunrei] though which would be a shame as it's a convenient 
> name so I'm willing to wait to register [kunrei]-- but I'm also 
> willing to wager that the prefix [ja-Latn] is what [kunrei] will 
> ultimately get!

There were a few arguments against registering 'kunrei' at present, 
among which were that nobody had asked for it except to tile the plane, 
and that the differences between Kunrei-shiki and Nihon-shiki were not 
being treated consistently with the differences between flavors of 
Kunrei-shiki.  But I don't remember anyone doubting that "ja-Latn" would 
be the appropriate Prefix for Kunrei-shiki.  And even if this were in 
question, it isn't a foregone conclusion that determination of a 
"better" Prefix would result in the subtag being deprecated.

--
Doug Ewell  |  Thornton, Colorado, USA  |  http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14  |  ietf-languages @ http://is.gd/2kf0s ­