Subject: [Ietf-languages] Language variant subtag "tongyong" addition request (for Mandarin Chinese romanization) (Resubmission)

From: Phake Nick <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 May 2020 21:20:33 +0800

This request is a resubmission of a similar request from January 2019, with
a few changes including additional reference links (Thanks to Doug Ewell's
help) and also removed hak/nan prefix from the request (While Tongyong
romanization system for the two languages have been created published, the
amount of people using them seems minimal and thus it's probably betternot
to conflate the subtag with the version of system for those languages)

1. Name of requester: Phake Nick

2. E-mail address of requester: c933103 at gmail.com

3. Record Requested:

Type: variant
Subtag: tongyong
Description: Tongyong Pinyin romanization
Prefix: zh-Latn
Comments: Former official transcription standard for Mandarin Chinese in
Taiwan.

4. Intended meaning of the subtag: Indicate Romanized content that use
Tongyong pinyin romanization

5. Reference to published description of the language (book or
article):

a. "Guidelines of Using Chinese Phonetic Spelling", published by the
government of Taiwan in 2002.
http://www.rootlaw.com.tw/LawContent.aspx?LawID=A040030001010900-1000310

b. "Hanyu Pinyin to be standard system in 2009". Shih Hsiu-Chuan. In
Taipei Times, 2008-09-18.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2008/09/18/2003423528

c. "Lost in Romanisation". In The Economist, 2014-06-07.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2014/06/07/lost-in-romanisation

6. Any other relevant information: The Tongyong Pinyin transcription
standard was official in Taiwan in the mid-2000s. It has now been displaced
by Pinyin romanization as the official transcription rule for Chinese
languages in Taiwan, however it is still continually being used to a
certain extent within Taiwan and thus it would be helpful to have a variant
subtag to separate it from Pinyin Romanization.

---

From: Sascha Brawer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 May 2020 15:46:35 +0200

Instead of a BCP47 variant tag, would it be an option to register a
BCP 47 extension T
transform tag at Unicode CLDFR? This would be similar to the existing
registered tags for
other transliteration schemes such as alaloc, bgn, buckwalt, ungegn, etc.
Your full BCP47 language tag would then look like “zh-Latn-t-zh-m0-tongyong”.

For background about BCP47 extension T, see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6497.
To go this route, file a CLDR ticket:
http://cldr.unicode.org/index/bug-reports#TOC-File-a-Ticket
asking to add a tag for Tongyong to this file:
https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/master/common/bcp47/transform.xml

— Sascha

Am Mi., 20. Mai 2020 um 15:21 Uhr schrieb Phake Nick <[email-masked]>:
>
> This request is a resubmission of a similar request from January 2019, with a few changes including additional reference links (Thanks to Doug Ewell's help) and also removed hak/nan prefix from the request (While Tongyong romanization system for the two languages have been created published, the amount of people using them seems minimal and thus it's probably betternot to conflate the subtag with the version of system for those languages)
>
> Comments: Former official transcription standard for Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan.
>
> 6. Any other relevant information: The Tongyong Pinyin transcription standard was official in Taiwan in the mid-2000s. It has now been displaced by Pinyin romanization as the official transcription rule for Chinese languages in Taiwan, however it is still continually being used to a certain extent within Taiwan and thus it would be helpful to have a variant subtag to separate it from Pinyin Romanization.
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf-languages mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages

---

From: Phake Nick <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 May 2020 22:41:49 +0800

Another Chinese romanization scheme, the Pinyin romanization, have already
been registered as a variant subtag in the language subtag registry. To
keep in line with that, it would be better to also register the Tongyong
Pinyin subtag as variant subtag instead of a T-transformation subtag.

Also, unlike transliteration schemes like ungegn or alaloc where their main
purposes are to transliterate foreign script content into latin script, the
main purpose of Pinyin or Tongyong Pinyin system, other than to provide a
transliteration system, they also act as ways to denote pronunciation of
Chinese characters in the Mandarin Chinese language for the use by speakers
of the language, since Chinese characters themselves does not carry the
pronunciation information.

在 2020年5月20日週三 21:46，Sascha Brawer <[email-masked]> 寫道：

> > This request is a resubmission of a similar request from January 2019,
> with a few changes including additional reference links (Thanks to Doug
> Ewell's help) and also removed hak/nan prefix from the request (While
> Tongyong romanization system for the two languages have been created
> published, the amount of people using them seems minimal and thus it's
> probably betternot to conflate the subtag with the version of system for
> those languages)
> >

---

From: Michael Everson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 May 2020 18:08:57 +0100

It looks OK to me.

> On 20 May 2020, at 14:20, Phake Nick <[email-masked]> wrote:
>

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 May 2020 15:12:22 -0600

Phake Nick wrote:

> Another Chinese romanization scheme, the Pinyin romanization, have
> already been registered as a variant subtag in the language subtag
> registry. To keep in line with that, it would be better to also
> register the Tongyong Pinyin subtag as variant subtag instead of a
> T-transformation subtag.

We actually have variants in the Registry for Jyutping and Wade-Giles, as well as Pinyin. The CLDR "m0" transforms don't appear to include any Chinese-to-Chinese scheme identifiers. So I tend to agree with Nick here.

> Also, unlike transliteration schemes like ungegn or alaloc where their
> main purposes are to transliterate foreign script content into latin
> script, the main purpose of Pinyin or Tongyong Pinyin system, other
> than to provide a transliteration system, they also act as ways to
> denote pronunciation of Chinese characters in the Mandarin Chinese
> language for the use by speakers of the language, since Chinese
> characters themselves does not carry the pronunciation information.

The guidelines of which transcriptions should be represented using BCP 47 variants (which came first) and which should use the T extension are certainly unclear at times. I agree with Nick's point here as well.

I don't remember what I said about this proposal when Nick proposed it before, so if someone wants to find it in the archives and cite my contrary arguments, I'm willing to think about it some more. At the moment I think this is a reasonable request for the LSR.

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