Re: wadegile and pinyin LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORMs

["Randy Presuhn" <[e-mail]>]

Hi -

Doug wrote:

...
> > In any event, it is certainly well-defined, meaningful, and legitimate 
> > to register "pinyin" and "wadegile" with the prefix "zh-Latn", as 
> > meaning "Chinese momanizations"; they certainly exist and are in 
> > widespread usage.
> 
> I thought this would be fine, but others are concerned that "zh-pinyin" 
> could be used with other Chinese languages/dialects written in different 
> romanizations that are also called "pinyin."  Apparently this would be 
> bad.
> 
> If we register "zh" as a prefix, we can't ever take it away, because of 
> the restriction against narrowing.  We can only add other prefixes.

However, if the registrations are quite clear that the variants being
registered are specifically orthographies of *Mandarin* Chinese, I
don't think a registration with 'zh' is terribly problematic, even
though I'd clearly prefer if possible to go directly to something
built on cmn.

If someone needs to request registration of variants for other
romanizations of other Chinese "dialects", they remain free to
do so - these particular requests for these particular romanizations
of this dialect have no bearing on the others.

Randy