Re: [Ltru] IPA and other transcriptions (was: Re: script tag for IPA)

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

>> In what way -- other than the actual repertoire of characters used --  
>> do IPA and other phonetic and phonemic notation systems, differ from 
>> those?
>
> I would say in that IPA and its rivals are not orthographies; that is, 
> the meaning of [f] in IPA is standardized, but the choice of when to 
> use it in the representation of some language depends on the acuity of 
> the transcriber.  Per contra, it is very clear when "f" is to be 
> written in the various romanizations of Japanese, whether the sound 
> represented is IPA [f] or not.

I agree that there are differences in the details of their use, but what 
I was getting at was that both are alternative "ways of writing" 
language (note that incredibly vague phrase).  Pinyin (et al.) is not a 
"normal" way of writing Chinese (et al.); it is a special application 
for learners and other non-native readers of the language.  (This is 
different from, say, Serbian in Cyrillic/Latin, where native readers 
might use either script.)

Likewise, IPA (et al.) is not a "normal" way of writing English (et 
al.); it is a special application for linguists and others who need to 
represent the exact (or nearly exact) pronunciation of the language.

> And I do agree that IPA (and rival) sound transcription systems are a 
> very different matter from mere variants in transcription like pinyin 
> vs. Wade-Giles or Hepburn vs. kunrei shiki.

OK, well, that wasn't the way I saw it, but since almost everyone on 
this list probably has more linguistic training than I do, perhaps I 
should back off on this.

Maybe the thing to consider in 4646bis is whether we should remove the 
extension mechanism altogether.  If transcription and transliteration 
systems aren't a good application for extensions, I really don't know 
what is, and nobody else has come forward with a "favorite" potential 
application for them.  The examples in 4646 are all contrived. 
Extensions have never been valid in real-world language tags (since none 
are defined), so they could be removed without breaking anything, and 
doing so would simplify parsers.  "Deprecating" them, of course, would 
be completely pointless.

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
RFC 4645  *  UTN #14

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