Re: Subtag registration: Russian transliteration of Chinese

[Michael Everson <[e-mail]>]

On 13 Oct 2015, at 14:21, Mark Davis ☕️ <[e-mail]> 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