Re: Pinyin

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

Hi -

> From: "Doug Ewell" <[e-mail]>
> To: <[e-mail]>
> Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 6:03 PM
> Subject: Re: Pinyin
...
> zh-(Latn-)pinyin = Chinese written in a "pinyin" romanization, could be
>    Hanyu or Tongyong but definitely not Wade-Giles
...

There's a clear need to tag some Mandarin material as specifically Hanyu Pinyin.

There's also a clear need to tag some Mandarin material as specifically Wade-Giles.

There's probably a need to tag some Mandarin material as specifically Tongyong Pinyin.
(Has a request for this actually been received, or is it something that just
"appeared" in the course of discussion?)

But what is the use case for wanting to split off Wade-Giles but lump
together Tongyong and Hanyu Pinyin, as well as everything else
"not Wade-Giles"?

I really fail to see the rationale for gathering the various
more-or-less pinyin-like orthographies under a single banner.
It's not like they're so similar that it would be difficult
to distinguish them - as reported earlier here, about 20%
of possible Mandarin syllables are spelled differently using
Tongyong.  Nor can I see how it would be useful to treat them
as being somehow "alike."  Nor do I think it at all likely that
we'll be seeing many (or any) texts "in the wild" in which the
two are intermingled, other than a text comparing the orthographies.

Randy