wadegile and pinyin LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORMs

John Cowan cowan at ccil.org
Wed Sep 3 16:52:16 CEST 2008


Peter Constable scripsit:

> I think we all agree that Latin is implied. Chinese is also implied. By
> this rationale, a complete tag of "wadegile" would work just as
> well as "zh-wadegile" (BCP47 syntax requirements aside). In terms of
> semantic representation, that is true: "wadegile" contains just as
> much information as does "zh-wadegile".

However, all tags MUST have a language subtag, so this analogy is not on all fours.

> Those are made more complicated if "Latn" is not part of the prefix for
> "wadegile" and "pinyin".

You still need to know that "wadegile" and "pinyin" imply Latin, because
the Prefix for a subtag is only a SHOULD, so people are still free to
send you "zh-wadegile" whether the Prefix says "zh" or "zh-Latn".

-- 
My confusion is rapidly waxing          John Cowan
For XML Schema's too taxing:            cowan at ccil.org
    I'd use DTDs                        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    If they had local trees --
I think I best switch to RELAX NG.


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