LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM (R3): pinyin

[Doug Ewell]

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

>> Nobody has seriously proposed making 'pinyin' a generic variant like 
>> 'fonipa'.  At most they have suggested that a small set of languages 
>> be added as multiple Prefix fields.
>
> On the contrary, that is exactly what Michael has proposed: making the 
> subtag 'pinyin' mean 'any romanization called pin1yin1 in Chinese, 
> except for wei1tuo3ma3 pin1yin1, otherwise known as Wade-Giles 
> romanization.

Sorry, I hadn't read his latest post closely enough:

> Accordingly, I believe that the best course of action is *not* to 
> specify a prefix.

Previously I thought he was proposing "zh" to allow all Chinese, with an 
option to add "bo" and others on a one-off basis.

I agree that this is excessive, though I would not have said that about 
"zh".  You can't write just any imaginable language in Pinyin -- any 
Pinyin -- the way you can write any language in IPA.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
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