Subtag registration: Russian transliteration of Chinese
Michael Everson
everson at evertype.com
Tue Oct 13 22:29:32 CEST 2015
On 13 Oct 2015, at 14:21, Mark Davis ☕️ <mark at macchiato.com> wrote:
>
> > “Eto obrezets prigovor” is in no way English.
>
> I agree. It's a bit of a gray area, because "Gorbachev" is definitely an English word,
No, it isn’t, any more than “Davis” is a Chinese or Russian word, though it might be transliterated into CJK or Cyrillic.
Personal and place-names are not quite the same things as other words in languages.
> though originally Russian, just as "Athens" is an English word, though originally Greek.
I think this is also mistaken. Orthography is not the same thing in this case. Now, Athens and Rome and (the old-fashioned) Tiflis are foreign names which got naturalized into English (Ἀθῆναι, Roma, and თბილისი), but that is not the same thing as transliteration either. Nowadays we don’t use “Tiflis” any more; we transliterate “Tbilisi”.
> We choose to use the direction we did because the primary use case for transformations is for place names and person names, and because it also works better for script transforms: und-Cyrl-t-und-Latn is marking text that is *in* Cyrillic, though originally from English.
Declaring something “und” is not the same thing as declaring “Eto obrezets prigovor” to be English per se.
Michael
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