Subject: [Ietf-languages] Tibetan Ewts variant proposal (and related questions)

From: Élie Roux <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2018 15:10:16 +0100

Dear all,

I'm working at Buddhist Digital Resource Center (https://www.tbrc.org/)
and as we're moving to RDF, we defined the lang tags we needed on

https://github.com/BuddhistDigitalResourceCenter/owl-schema/blob/master/lang-tags.md

(lists towards the end, all comments are welcome). We had to define
custom tags for many of them and I would like to try having some of them
officially registered to improve interoperability with related projects.
Don't hesitate to tell me if I'm taking the wrong approach. Here's the
first attempt, with the tag we have the most in our dataset:

LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM
1. Name of requester: Elie Roux
2. E-mail address of requester: [email-masked]
3. Record Requested:

    Type: variant
    Subtag: ewts
    Description: Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme (EWTS)
    Prefix: bo

4. Intended meaning of the subtag:
5. Reference to published description
    of the language (book or article):
6. Any other relevant information:
    Common romanization of Tibetan, defined by
       http://www.thlib.org/reference/transliteration/#!essay=/thl/ewts/
    Applies primarily to Tibetan and Sanskrit transliterated in Tibetan
script.
    It could be applied to Dzongkha and other languages using the Tibetan
script,
    but would then lack some features (notably the Dzongkha affixes like
in རྒྱལཔོ།).
    Hence the bo prefix, but maybe it could be extended.

A question I have is about having -Latn in the prefix. Here is first a
little bit of context:
- pinyin mandates the -Latn script indication: zh-Latn-pinyin and not
zh-pinyin
- alalc97 seems to be different (unless I'm mistaken): bo-alalc97 and
not bo-Latn-alac97
- some "romanizations" are not entirely in the Latn script, the
romanization used by Poppe for Classical Mongolian uses Latin characters
plus γ (GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA)
- because Ewts transliteration is non-ambiguously in the Latn script, we
decided to use bo-x-ewts instead of bo-Latn-x-ewts

If this new variant subtag was to be accepted, would its correct use be
bo-Latn-ewts or bo-ewts?

Thank you,
-- 
Elie

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2018 07:26:48 -0700

Élie,

Variant subtags that begin with a letter must be 5 to 8 characters long, 
to avoid conflicting structurally with script subtags such as 'Latn'. I 
know this is unfortunate in this particular case because 'ewts' is an 
obvious choice.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org

---

From: Élie Roux <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2018 15:33:36 +0100

> Variant subtags that begin with a letter must be 5 to 8 characters 
> long, to avoid conflicting structurally with script subtags such as 
> 'Latn'. I know this is unfortunate in this particular case because 
> 'ewts' is an obvious choice.

I see... sorry for my confusion! What about ewts20? There is a version
number on

after all. I really don't think it's going to evolve but that would be a
two birds one stone situation (adding version and being 5 to 8 letters
long).

Thank you,
-- 
Elie

---

From: "Phillips, Addison" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2018 14:49:11 +0000

While that would fix the length issue, I'm pretty sure you don't want to track version numbers unless the change in version is highly significant.

Since this is a transliteration scheme, have you looked at the -t- extension?

~Addison

Thank you,
--
Elie

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---

From: Élie Roux <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2018 16:00:49 +0100

Le 09/03/2018 à 15:49, Phillips, Addison a écrit :
> While that would fix the length issue, I'm pretty sure you don't
> want to track version numbers unless the change in version is highly 
> significant.

Well, I was just copying the alalc97 subtag... but as you say, it's
problematic.

> Since this is a transliteration scheme, have you looked at the -t- 

I did: http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/10547

After a few months of silence I've just received an answer a few minutes
ago, so maybe that will work.

But alalc97 is still registered in IANA even if

http://unicode.org/repos/cldr/trunk/common/bcp47/transform.xml

contains "alaloc". I admit I would really prefer having bo-ewts20 than
bo-t-m0-ewts...

Thank you,
-- 
Elie

---

From: Mark Davis ☕️ <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2018 17:22:11 +0100

Just saw your message.

That ticket was not assigned a milestone, as it should have been when it
was reviewed.

We'll still want to assign it as an m0, since we ignore the variants for
transliteration.

Mark