Phonetic orthographies

[David Starner]

On 11/22/06, Eric Muller <emuller at adobe.com> wrote:
> why not just say
> that the four-chars subtags are orthographies and be done with it?

Because scripts are fairly clearly separated and independent of
language, but orthographies are indiscrete and very language
dependent. What are the orthographies of English in Latn? Cross-time,
I can come with six or seven major ones. ru-Latn doesn't really tell
us anything about the orthography of that text, and Wikipedia (Russian
transliteration) lists nine different possibilities. en-Arab tells us
nothing about the orthography of the text, and it might very well be
ad-hoc and hence untaggable.