Additional name "Cou" for 'tsu' (was: i-tsu: minor correction in RFC 5646 language tag entry)

Pascal Vaillant pascal.vaillant at guyane.univ-ag.fr
Thu Sep 25 19:10:45 CEST 2014


> Does anyone see a reason not to submit a request to add the new
> description as shown below, citing this reference? There is no existing
> language named "Cou" in the Registry with which this would conflict.
> 

Well, I do, but perhaps I just need more explanation as to
why the submitter of the request proposed to add "cou".

The name of this Austronesian language (and ethnic group,
by the way), derives from a word of the language which was
transliterated into Chinese by the morpheme 鄒 [1]. "Tsou"
is the Wade-Giles transliteration of the Chinese character
鄒 in Latin alphabet, Wade-Giles being a common transliteration
scheme in Taiwan. A logical reason -it seems to me- to add
another alternate name in the Latin alphabet would be to
include the Latin transliteration in the more popular, and
more widespread, transliteration scheme pinyin (created in
the PRC and now widely used).

BUT the pinyin transliteration of 鄒 is "zou", not "cou".
The non-aspirated fricative dental is noted "ts" in Wade
and "z" in pinyin. The aspirated corresponding consonant
is noted "ts'" in Wade and "c" in pinyin, but 鄒 in the
received Mandarin pronounciation (in Taiwan "guoyu")
actually is "zou" and not "cou".

So it would seem logical to add "zou" (for people looking
over the same morpheme in pinyin transliteration), but why
"cou" ?

[1] http://www.dmtip.gov.tw/Eng/Tsou.htm

Best regards,

Pascal Vaillant



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