LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM (R4): pinyin
Michael Everson
everson at evertype.com
Tue Sep 9 22:34:11 CEST 2008
Wade-Giles is not Pinyin. It does not derive from Pinyin orthographic
conventions. Tibetan Pinyin and Tongyong Pinyin do, as do other uses
of Latin in romanizations used in China for Sino-Tibetan and other
languages.
It is probable that Wade-Giles conventions were used for languages
other than Mandarin, but the point is that we're looking to approve
both "wadegile" and "pinyin" subtags here.
I'm not convinced that these subtags should be restricted as has been
proposed to zh- or zh-Latn. Evidently there is some programmatic
utility to keeping -Latn following whatever prefix (zh-, bo-) though I
have yet to feel consensus amongst you as to whether zh-pinyin and zh-
Latn-pinyin should both be "allowed". It seems to me that both are
inevitable and that the revision should permit Suppress-script to be
attached to subtags like fonipa/fonupa/pinyin to prevent the
inevitable omission of -Latn-. But in any case I do believe that bo-
(Latn-)pinyin is appropriately subtagged by "pinyin" and despite the
fact that the requesters were only requesting Mandarin, there's more
beneath the hood than that.
Either we have no Prefix at all or we list a set of prefixes that we
know at present can be used with the subtag and presumably add more in
future.
Sorry Mark and Peter for the delay but this really does need to be
done right.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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