LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM: pinyin

[Peter Constable]

> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Doug Ewell


> 1. Since both variants have a prefix of "zh-Latn", it might be
> considered redundant for the Description fields to say "Pinyin
> Romanization...

Please, let's not go overboard is trying to eliminate all redundancy from the descriptions. I'd rather see descriptions that have as little possibility of being misunderstood as possible -- and as we all know error-recovery requires redundancy, so I think some redundancy may sometimes be helpful to avoid misinterpretation.



> 2. By making the prefix "zh-Latn" instead of "zh", you are essentially
> requiring taggers to write "zh-Latn-pinyin" instead of "zh-pinyin", or
> "zh-Latn-TW-wadegile" instead of "zh-TW-wadegile".  I assume this is
> what you want.  It seems a bit contrary to what we discussed in LTRU
> about "fonipa" not requiring "Latn".

I'm inclined to think it a mistake for "fonipa" not to require "Latn". The semantic principle we use in combining subtags is that subtags added on the end add specificity / narrow the extension for the overall semantic. Just as "Resian" qualifies "Slovenian", so also "IPA" qualifies "Latin"; and comparably just as we would *not* consider proposing that "rozaj" could be used without the "sl" prefix, so also it seems entirely reasonable to me that "fonipa" could/should be used with "Latn". Similarly, my initial reaction to the proposal is that having "zh-Latn" as the prefix in each case is fine.



Peter