Korean romanizations (Was: Japanese transliteration: ja-Latn-hepburn)

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Sat Sep 12 18:16:59 CEST 2009


I'm inclined to agree with Mark: we could spend a bunch of time coming up with tags for all kinds of variant text representations with no knowing which people are actually interested in using. I personally don't want to occupy my time that way. When someone needs a subtag for Hangul Romanization, they'll come asking, and we'll sort it out then. I don't get the impression Doug has an actual usage need at this time.


Peter

From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Kent Karlsson
Sent: Saturday, September 12, 2009 3:41 AM
To: Mark Davis
Cc: ietf-languages at iana.org; Doug Ewell
Subject: Re: Korean romanizations (Was: Japanese transliteration: ja-Latn-hepburn)

See below.

Den 2009-09-12 02.34, skrev "Mark Davis" <mark at macchiato.com>:

Mark


On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 03:58, Kent Karlsson <kent.karlsson14 at comhem.se> wrote:

Den 2009-09-11 05.04, skrev "Doug Ewell" <doug at ewellic.org>:

> Geez, all I had in mind for Korean was registering the three most common
> romanizations, which anyone familiar with Korean could name off the top
> of their head.

I would suggest that you just submit the appropriate registration forms
to the list. I don't think there is the requirement that the submitter
promises to "start using the subtag for the submitter's immediate needs",
nor that the submitter has been using the variants for which subtags are
requested. I think the subtags you allude to here are useful enough to be
registered.

No, but what I'm afraid of is that then someone else will say, well, we might as well do Thai romanizations, and then Lao, and then Russian, and then... There is a pretty unending supply of these things.

Well, that is what this group is here for... Processing such requests.

  1.  "Are useful enough to be registered"
  2.  "Are useful enough to be registered, and someone has a need for it"
I'm just saying that as a working process, #2 gets people what they need, and is manageable by this group. #1 would completely swamp this group.

"Need" does not necessarily mean "we need this in our system now".


    /kent k

PS
This is in contrast to trying to register a subtag for a lone pronunciation
quirk (by itself that hardly makes a dialect) or for using old road/highway
names/numbers instead of their newer names/numbers (totally irrelevant for
language tagging, methinks).

Hardly makes a dialect?  If you are referring to the example I gave, of en-US-socapgfr, it is probably spoken by as many or more people than speak your native language...

Number of speakers does not a dialect make. But I guess this comes down to where the border between dialect and minor pronunciation quirk(s) goes. And I'm sure that can be hotly debated. I would still not count highway reference method (old or new names) as relevant in that regard. Very few dialects have been registered in LSR. If requests for more of them come in, I think it would be good to try to align them with how dialectologists delineate them.
Of course, I was using an extreme example, but it was to make a point. For *somebody* that level of precision might be important, just as for *somebody* the distinction between sl-rozaj-biske and sl-rozaj-njiva, or between sl-rozaj-biske and sl-rozaj-biske-1994 is important. We can't anticipate all the possible differences that people might need, nor can or should we try to second guess that in advance, but what we can do is make sure that the right tags are at the right levels of breadth when we do get requests.

But it also makes the registry very uneven when it comes to variants. I'm not sure how great hopes (or worries) one should have for ISO 639-6, I have seen neither text nor tabular data for it, but maybe it could make for a bit more "evenness" w.r.t. variants. (One would have to reactivate LTRU for using  -6 in the LSR...)

And overly specific variants, such as your "socapgfr" example, should not become registered anyway (IMO), even if someone were to ask for it. This is what private-use subtags are for.
And transliterations are notoriously tricky. What we actually use in CLDR for Korean, for example, is a "Korean Ministry of Culture & Tourism Transliteration with Clause 8 And Further Modifications for Reversibility Because the Source is Underspecified". (http://cldr.unicode.org/index/cldr-spec/transliteration-guidelines#Korean)
[Just noticed that we need to fix the links; the Ministry keeps moving the pages around -- sigh.]

That would surely be overly narrow for a registered variant subtag. Cmp. "pinyin", "hepburn", ...

        /kent k
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