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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