Reshat Sabiq's requests for two Tatar orthographic variants

Doug Ewell dewell at adelphia.net
Sun Feb 4 01:04:40 CET 2007


I suggest we resolve this matter as follows:

1.  Register a single variant subtag for the orthography, or family of 
orthographies, that Reşat is calling New Turkic Alphabet, for all of the 
prefixes he listed.  More can be added later if necessary, per Section 
3.1.

2.  Do NOT call this new subtag "nta".  (Variant subtags added under RFC 
4646 are canonically lowercase, though matching algorithms must be 
case-insensitive.)  The implied word "new" might unnecessarily reinforce 
the notion of this 1930s orthography as something "new," particularly in 
today's context where some former Soviet minority languages are again 
adopting (different) Latin orthographies.  Instead, call it by its Tatar 
name "janalif" unless this would be unacceptable to non-Tatar speakers.

3.  Apply whatever Description fields are deemed necessary — "New Turkic 
Alphabet", "Janalif" (or "Jaŋalif", but please not both), etc. — 
without going overboard.

4.  Register the subtag with little or no further delay, so Reşat can 
tag the content he has a legitimate desire to tag, and the list can move 
on.  Fifteen weeks is long enough.

Reshat Sabiq (Reşat) <tatar dot iqtelif dot i18n at gmail dot com> 
wrote:

> One could also suggest that ba-specific version of NTA was derived 
> from janalif (ba was a dialect of Tatar before 1923 based on some 
> articles). It's possible, i suppose to register janalif as a 
> subvariant of NTA for Tatar (and maybe also for Bashqort (Bashkir)), 
> but i'm not sure if that is necessary. It may be an overkill, as it 
> wouldn't make this much more informative, but would just look more 
> familiar for Tatar users.

There's no need to register separate variant subtags to reflect slightly 
different letter mappings used in different languages.  Certainly 
English, French, and Spanish do not map all Latin letter exactly the 
same way, nor do Russian and Ukrainian map all Cyrillic letters the 
same, yet there is no perceived need to tag their writing systems 
differently.  The language subtag should be sufficient to indicate which 
specific variation of Jaŋalif/NTA is present.

CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> replied:

> (Alas, so far most people here seem to be mostly only worried about 
> the subtags' being familiar to the software when software is finally 
> developed that will handle the new subtags, and seem to be not very 
> worried about the subtags' being familiar or easily used by HTML 
> coders; but if janalif maps letters differently then perhaps it would 
> make sense to register it!)

I don't understand the remark about subtags "being familiar to the 
software."  No software is supposed to know anything about any subtag 
unless it finds it in the Language Subtag Registry.  We do have 
syntactical limits, such as "no three-letter variants," that allow 
software (and humans) to parse tags without having to look up the 
meaning of each subtag.  My suggestion to register "janalif" instead of 
"nta" is intended to be better for both software and humans.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages



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