<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On 9 Sep 2008, at 06:31, Doug Ewell wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:<br><br><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">Nobody has seriously proposed making 'pinyin' a generic variant like <br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">'fonipa'. At most they have suggested that a small set of languages <br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">be added as multiple Prefix fields.<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">On the contrary, that is exactly what Michael has proposed: making the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: -1; ">subtag 'pinyin' mean 'any romanization called pin1yin1 in Chinese, except for wei1tuo3ma3 pin1yin1, otherwise known as Wade-Giles </span></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">romanization.</blockquote></div></blockquote><div><br></div>That's not so. It is the orthographic conventions that make an orthography Pinyin-based, not whether the word <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: -1; ">pin1yin1</span> is used in Chinese. </div><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: -1; ">Accordingly, I believe that the best course of action is *not* to </span></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">specify a prefix.<br></blockquote><br>Previously I thought he was proposing "zh" to allow all Chinese, with an <br>option to add "bo" and others on a one-off basis.<br><br>I agree that this is excessive, though I would not have said that about "zh". You can't write just any imaginable language in Pinyin -- any Pinyin -- the way you can write any language in IPA.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>No, but you can write a number of languages of China in Pinyin-based romanizations. You can't write just any imaginable language in UPA either. (Well, you could, but you don't.. just a number of Uralic languages).</div><div><br></div><div>(And you could transcribe other languages like Engish or Turkish in Pinyin; it just wouldn't work very well. I wonder if there are pinyin-based Berlitz-style transcriptions for Chinese tourists.)</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: -webkit-monospace; ">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>