Variant request: Japanese modified Hepburn
Doug Ewell
doug at ewellic.org
Tue Sep 1 14:48:43 CEST 2009
I have no objection to this proposal on its own, and agree that the
Prefix field should be "ja-Latn" instead of "ja", based on the precedent
we set when registering 'pinyin' and 'wadegile'. Frank, who has not
posted here before, would not have known about the big debate we went
through at that time.
Naturally, I also agree with the mechanical detail that 'hepburn' as the
Description field needs to be all lowercase.
I gathered from Frank's request that he does want to distinguish Hepburn
from other Japanese romanization schemes, so that his particular needs
are not met by "ja-Latn" (though this might be sufficient for others,
just as "zh-Latn" might be sufficient for some).
I don't get the sense that it would serve Frank's needs to register
separate subtags for traditional vs. revised vs. modified Hepburn. If
someone has a concrete need for that, I suggest we consider second-level
variants to capture that level of detail, so that "ja-Latn-hepburn"
would still be available.
If others feel it is necessary to register subtags for the other
Japanese romanization schemes (kunrei-shiki and nihon-shiki), then they
can propose those subtags and we can discuss them in parallel with
Frank's request. I don't think registering 'hepburn' necessarily
implies that content labeled "ja-Latn" must be in a different
romanization, or that we are "favoring" one romanization or implicitly
declaring one to be the "default," and I'm concerned that our efforts to
tile the plane of possible language variations (here and elsewhere)
might become excessive. I'm also concerned about making the requester
feel that we are interrogating him about issues that are not his
concern.
--
Doug Ewell * Thornton, Colorado, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
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