Pinyin

[CE Whitehead]

Regarding Niall Tracey's concern, I think that if the various orthographies use an almost identical character set, it is o.k. to group them together and then provide additional variant subtags for those who seek further differentiation.  I do not think this will be perceived of as racist--though it would be interesting to hear from Tibetans and others.

(I've noted that we do not even bother to differentiate the various European orthographies used for French, Spanish, English; so I do not think it will be offensive to treat these as a group if they are closely related; on the contrary, I think it will be nice to have subtags for the related Romanizations of the different languages.  Of course, no one has requested all these but us, and we could wait for a request for all but the Hanu Pinyin Romanization of Mandarin, but if these orthographies are related, we do not need to do so ).


--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com