<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On 8 Sep 2008, at 17:15, Randy Presuhn wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>The pinyin orthography is highly optimized for the phonology of Mandarin Chinese. It would be terribly ill-suited for use with Vietnamese, English, German, French, and Russian, to name just a few languages for which the it lacks sufficient tone notation, vowel distinctions, stress markers, or consonants.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>But its orthographic conventions *are* used for other Sino-Tibetan languages in China.</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>The registration request is for a specific orthography of a specific language, which happens to reflect that language's phonology rather well. It is not a general-purpose transcription mechanism, and we shouldn't try to turn it into one.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>The Chinese have already done so. It is analogous to UPA, which is for the orthography of a set of related languages (Uralic ones). UPA might not be well-suited to represent Hausa or Mandarin or Vietnamese. But that doesn't mean that if someone had come asking to register "fonupa" with a Prefix restricting it to Sami that it wouldn't be right to notice that it was used with other languages as well.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: -1; "></span></div><div><br></div><div>I have a collection of Yi dictionaries. Some of them have Latin transcriptions in the Sinological variant of IPA. Others are in a Pinyin-based transcription. Should we have bopinyin, typinyin, yipinyin, and 40 others? I don't believe so.</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: -1;"><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: -1; ">Michael Everson * <a href="http://www.evertype.com/">http://www.evertype.com</a></span></div></div><div apple-content-edited="true"> </div><br></body></html>