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

[Kent Karlsson]

I don't recall anyone urgently needing, and indeed nobody asked for (it came
up during discussion), a subtag "pinyin" for Tibetan. Still it got
registered. And I don't complain about that. But I do complain (a bit) about
the arbitrariness. In the current line of discussion, originally only
"revised Hepburn" was asked for. This has during discussion been widened and
expanded. But somehow stepping over to Korean results in lots of no-no's.
**IF**, perchance, Hepburn romanisation **had** applied also to Korean,
would we then had seen these no-no's? There wasn't much objection when
"pinyin" was widened to cover also Tibetan as a prefix (something which
could have been done later). And why the no-no's when it is suggested that
maybe we should register some well-known romanisation for Korean? Just
arguing a bit in the hypothetical here, since I'm uncomfortable with too
much arbitrariness.

        /kent k



Den 2009-09-12 18.16, skrev "Peter Constable" <petercon at microsoft.com>:

> I¹m 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 don¹t want to occupy my
> time that way. When someone needs a subtag for Hangul Romanization, they¹ll
> come asking, and we¹ll sort it out then. I don¹t 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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