Flavors of Hepburn (was Status of Japanese requests)

CE Whitehead cewcathar at hotmail.com
Wed Oct 7 02:39:22 CEST 2009



Hi!  I do think that [kunrei] is a good name for a subtag and that there is a need for it perhaps, even if it is a small group that will use it; but you are right, Frank did ask for it mainly to 'tile the plane' since he was asked to do so.
For that reason, and--especially if there is a problem describing it--I can wait till someone more expert requests it.
Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org 
Tue Oct 6 05:50:46 CEST 2009 


> CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

>>> Yes. I contend that "any romanization of Japanese that fits the
>>> Hepburn model better than it fits other models" is a good definition,
>>> is reasonably concise, and ought to be used in the registration.
>>
>> This definition sounds fine, but Doug said not for the description
>> field--in the comments maybe??

> The Hepburn-related subtags have completed their two-week review period,
> have been submitted to IANA, and have been added to the Registry.  See
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry .
Hmm, I can't find these in Richard Ishida's utility (http://rishida.net/utils/subtags/); and alas, I am having a terrible, terrible problem downloading the registry (I thought it was my new mini mini mini but I can no longer download it at the library computer either).
> New registration forms can be submitted to this list if it is felt that 
> users, upon finding one subtag for "Hepburn romanization" and another 
> for "Hepburn romanization, Library of Congress method," the second of 
> which takes the first as part of its Prefix, will still be incapable of 
> understanding that the first is intended to be general.
(I don't see how this will not be understandable.  Oh well. ???)
>> I don't think it's completely clear that [kunrei] should not be 
>> registered as it is  well enough defined--I agree with Randy that we 
>> don't need to build a perfect tree here --that would be impossible; if 
>> we saw at a later date that the [kunrei] subtag should have as its 
>> prefix some other subtag in addition  [ja-Latn] we would need to 
>> deprecate [kunrei] though which would be a shame as it's a convenient 
>> name so I'm willing to wait to register [kunrei]-- but I'm also 
>> willing to wager that the prefix [ja-Latn] is what [kunrei] will 
>> ultimately get!

> There were a few arguments against registering 'kunrei' at present, 
> among which were that nobody had asked for it except to tile the
I think Frank mentioned that the kunrei romanization was taught in Japanese schools and that there were users in Japan who preferred the kunrei romanization of Japanese
(http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2009-September/009476.html)
but yes, Frank added a registration request for [kunrei] because
"a question was raised over the initial proposal to file Hepburn
only, without distinguishing it from something else -- kunrei is the
something else."
> and that the differences between Kunrei-shiki and Nihon-shiki were not 
> being treated consistently with the differences between flavors of 
> Kunrei-shiki.
Yes.  

> But I don't remember anyone doubting that "ja-Latn" would 
> be the appropriate Prefix for Kunrei-shiki.  
O.k.  (What I was referring to was Frank's comment [http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2009-September/009477.html]
that:

"In that case, as you say, "kunrei" may not even be the best
top-level subtag for that category of variants, and the sorting out of
that corner of the mess should perhaps best be left to another day.") Best,

C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com
 		 	   		  
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