Korean romanizations (Was: Japanese transliteration: ja-Latn-hepburn)

Mark Davis ⌛ mark at macchiato.com
Thu Sep 10 18:24:42 CEST 2009


I think this is misinterpreting Randy's words. We do need to take into
account what is being applied for, in order to make it as broadly applicable
as possible. And often that involves recommending either narrowing or
broadening the definition after discussion. And we *absolutely* need to take
into account what is being asked for, and why.

Often the request is too narrow. I could request a subtag for
en-US-socapgfr, which is for that variant of English spoken by people who
were raised in Southern California, but moved out before the Great Freeway
Renaming. Ken Whistler and I happen to share this variant -- we speak like
Southern Californians (with the pen/pin and father/bother merges, etc), but
don't use the distinctive pattern "the 101" to refer to freeways that arose
in the south after we both left.

A non-trivial number of people use this variant; more speak it daily than
the populations of over 95% of the primary languages in the iana registry
(2σ, for geeks). Yet the first question this group should ask if I came in
requesting this variant would be about the usage scenario. That would
include whether a broader term would be more generally useful; and even if I
needed the narrower term, we'd probably want to also register
en-US-californi first, and make that a prefix.

And just because we register California American English doesn't mean that
we immediately want to also register Pacific Northwest American English, and
Southern American English, and Northeastern American English, and all the
many, many subvariants of them. If we really tried to register every variant
down to the specific variant that *someone, somewhere, *might* want*, that
would take a huge amount of effort, just for American English. Multiply that
by all the possible languages there are, and by all the linguists who would
analyse variants in different ways, and you end up with a mind-boggling
number of variants -- far, far beyond the ability of this group to handle.

Instead, the model is to try to reasonably satisfy each applicant's
immediate needs, while making reasonable efforts to make sure that what is
being asked for is broadly enough defined to be useful for the most people,
and to add reasonable more-general prefixes if needed.

Mark


On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 01:42, Kent Karlsson <kent.karlsson14 at comhem.se>wrote:

>
> Den 2009-09-10 08.17, skrev "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn at mindspring.com
> >:
>
> > register a broad or narrow definition of a particular variant should be
> > based on the registrant's needs, ...
>
> Registering a variant subtag is making the subtag available for anyone
> to use. If it is just the registrant's needs that are relevant, a
> private-use subtag is the appropriate thing to use, not registering
> anything.
>
>    /kent k
>
>
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