Japanese transliteration: ja-Latn-hepburn

[Doug Ewell]

CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

> I still think that [pinyin] and [wadegile] can serve as precedents for 
> how we treat [hepburn] !  But I'm not sure I see a consensus on this 
> point.

For Chinese, we differentiated (Hanyu) Pinyin from Wade-Giles with two 
separate variants.  For Japanese, we are talking about differentiating 
Hepburn from Kunrei-shiki from Nihon-shiki with three separate variants. 
I don't think there is much debate over that.

The question is whether the variant 'hepburn' for our purposes means 
only Revised Hepburn, in which case we would need a fourth and fifth 
variant under "ja-Latn" to denote Traditional and Modified Hepburn 
respectively, or whether 'hepburn' means any variety of Hepburn, in 
which case we would need three new variants under "ja-Latn-hepburn" to 
distinguish between the three varieties.  This is the approach I prefer, 
because it would still be possible to say "any old Hepburn," which I 
think will be a common use case since the varieties are so similar.  But 
this is where I think there may still be differences of opinion.

This is not an issue we dealt with when discussing 'pinyin' and 
'wadegile'.  "zh-Latn-pinyin" explicitly means Chinese in Hanyu Pinyin, 
according to the registration form at 
http://www.iana.org/assignments/lang-subtags-templates/pinyin, while 
currently there is no way to tag Tongyong Pinyin.

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