LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM: pinyin

[Randy Presuhn]

Hi -

> From: "Michael Everson" <everson at evertype.com>
> To: "ietflang" <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2008 11:39 AM
> Subject: Re: LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM: pinyin
>
> I'm puzzled as to why other important Romanizations such ashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwoyeu_Romatzyh 
>   and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping andhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization 
>   have not been requested. Note that Jyutping is an Romanized input  
> method used in Vista.

I think the cited Wikipedia article explains why we have not
seen requests for these:

| They were once used in the US for teaching these Asian languages to 
| civilian students, but are now mostly obscure and only sometimes used
| by academic linguists. Teaching Mandarin, for example, virtually always
| employs Hanyu Pinyin. McCune-Reischauer, which predates Yale, has
| dominated the Korean romanization field for several decades and has
| recently lost ground to the Revised Romanization rather than to any Yale-
| based system.

A data point -

When I studied Mandarin as a graduate student decades ago, the only
system we used was (Hanyu) Pinyin.  Wade-Giles was mentioned as a
"historical footnote", as something we minght encounter in old card
catalogs.  No mention was made of the Yale system.  When someone
has a need to catalog material in these systems, we'll see the registration
requests, and can deal with them at that time  But I won't hold my breath
waiting for them.  :-)

Randy