Revised request: Japanese transliteration variants

[Randy Presuhn]

Hi -

Never mind.  An earlier message from Frank (which arrived after my
response) explained it all.  :-)

Randy

----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn at mindspring.com>
> To: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 5:39 PM
> Subject: Re: Revised request: Japanese transliteration variants
>
> Hi -
> 
> > From: "John Cowan" <cowan at ccil.org>
> > To: "Frank Bennett" <biercenator at gmail.com>
> > Cc: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> > Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 3:03 PM
> > Subject: Re: Revised request: Japanese transliteration variants
> ...
> > > I am not intending to claim "hepburn" as the unique designation for a
> > > particular system.  I only mean to point at the ALA-LC tables as the
> > > most complete and accessible set of transliteration instructions for a
> > > commonly used Hepburn romanization method.  If another party wishes to
> > > register a subvariant, and it became necessary to distinguish this
> > > common form from other variants, I would be happy to apply for a
> > > subvariant at that point.  But I'm not sure there will be a demand for
> > > that, and it seems better to keep the spec as simple as possible to
> > > satisfy the current need (which is just to distinguish "text of the
> > > hepburn sort" from "text of the kurei sort").
> > 
> > In that case, reference to "revised" or "modified" should be removed
> > from the draft of the entry itself (as opposed to the supporting
> > information, where it can remain).
> ...
> 
> I'm a little puzzled.  I *thought* the request was to register a *specific* one
> of the various flavors of Hepburn, leaving open the possibility that others
> might someday want to register other flavors of Hepburn.  It's clear to me
> how such a thing would be used, and how it would be useful.  It was only
> somewhat unclear whether the original request intended "revised" or "modified",
> since it used both names.
> 
> It now sounds like at least some on this list are interpreting this as a request to register
> a variant subtag that would be usable for any of the various flavors of Hepburn.
> If someone needed to tag something as being in a specific flavor of Hepburn,
> an additional variant subtag would be needed. Though I can understand the
> architectural appeal of such an approach, it's less clear to me how such a thing
> would actually be useful, except perhaps for auto-tagging of strings that look
> the same in multiple flavors of Hepburn.  Earlier examples in this thread
> indicated that there were contexts in which a specific Hepburn flavor would
> be required, which would lead me to conclude that there is a need to distinguish
> at least that particular variety from "generic Hepburn".
> 
> If we already know that what is to be tagged is a specific flavor of Hepburn, and
> admit the possibility that there will be a need to distinguish the other varieties,
> and do not want "legacy" material to be ambiguous in its tagging, then we need
> to register that specific flavor now, either as a subtag of ja-Latn or of ja-Latn-hepburn,
> whichever approach finds favor here.  Otherwise, we'll be creating a situation
> analogous to 'zh' and 'cmn'.
> 
> Randy
> 
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