Variant subtag proposal: ALA-LC romanization of Russian

[Doug Ewell]

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

>> This may be by design, of course, but are the differences between 
>> revisions really expected to be so great that their subtags should be 
>> as different as 'scouse' and 'boont'?
>
> Oh yes.  Alalc97 romanization for Chinese is modified Wade-Giles, 
> whereas the current ALA/LC standard is modified Pinyin (no tone marks, 
> and slightly different rules for dividing words, which is the really 
> hard part of romanizing Chinese). IIUC, stability is more important 
> than minor changes for correctness, so when they change something, 
> it's usually a major change.

Very good.  I got the answer I was looking for -- we really do want to 
limit the scope of the 'alalc97' subtag to the 1997 revision -- and one 
I was hoping for -- we don't plan to add a whole slew of these things.

Martin's point is well taken; the fact that post-1997 romanizations are 
not included should be specified clearly in the registration form (or 
even in a Comments field).

Since the online references for Russian and Japanese are still taken 
from the 1997 book, it seems this subtag would meet not only Avram's 
needs for Russian but also Frank's for Japanese, particularly since 
Frank has expressed a preference for deprecating his own 'heploc' in 
favor of 'alalc97'.

I still can't help thinking this whole jumble of variant subtags for 
transliterations and transcriptions, some of which apply to multiple 
languages and some of which don't, specified by a variety of official 
and unofficial authorities and in significantly different revisions, 
could have been much cleaner if implemented as an extension.  But that 
window is closed.

--
Doug Ewell  |  Thornton, Colorado, USA  |  http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14  |  ietf-languages @ http://is.gd/2kf0s ­