Subject: [Ltru] Re: IPA as a script

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:34:27 -0800

Stop press -- I actually agreed with everything Frank had to say in a 
post.

Frank Ellermann <nobody at xyzzy dot claranet dot de> wrote:

> Peter Constable wrote:
>
>> As I suggested in the past, I think relegating transcription entirely 
>> to an extension would be undesirable because it would be ignored by 
>> any process that had no knowledge of the extension, which would be 
>> many.
>
> Why's that a bad thing ?  My use case would be Latn dictionaries, and 
> I won't care which phonetic alphabet they use.  Probably they also 
> offer wav-files.
>
>> What would work better would be to have a script-variant subtag for 
>> Latin-based transcriptions and have an extension to differentiate 
>> between different kinds of transcription / transliteration.
>
> I don't see why that's better.  With a variant subtag "slbtgsei" (some 
> Latn based transcription gibberish, see extension info) plus extension 
> t-whatever you get tags like en-slbtgsei-t-whatever
>
> That's longer than en-t-whatever, where or why would it work better ?
>
> With a script-variant "Latt" (Latn transcription specified elsewhere) 
> a tag en-Latt-t-whatever could be even harmful, if it's my use case of 
> a dictionary, and I could read its Latn-parts - but never get it if I 
> filter out "Latt" as "non-Latn".

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages 

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---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 06:28:58 -0800

Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft dot com> wrote:

> On the other hand, suppose I'm searching for English content, but I 
> really don't want phonetic transcription because it's all gibberish to 
> me. If a site has a corpus of texts in phonetic transcription but 
> they're all tagged en-t-ipa and the tools basically ignore the 
> extension because they know nothing about it, then I get returned to 
> me all that gibberish I'd rather not have to deal with. But if that 
> same content were tagged en-Lphn-t-ipa, then those same tools *do* 
> understand that Lphn is not the same as Latn and can filter out that 
> content I don't want.

The crux of this argument is that tag consumers -- including those for 
which normal Latin vs. IPA is an important distinction -- won't 
implement the extension mechanism, or won't have access to the RFC that 
defines the 't' extensions.

To me this is similar to the argument that subtags, including new 
inventions like "script variants," need to be placed in such a way that 
remove-from-right matching won't cause them to be stripped, because tag 
consumers aren't going to implement the matching strategies in RFC 4647 
anyway.  It assumes that people won't use the mechanisms we invent, so 
we should discourage their use even as we introduce them.  This is one 
main reason why I'm reluctant to support new inventions.

I don't remember exactly who came up with the idea of extensions in the 
first place, but maybe one of the original proponents could explain what 
use he or she had in mind for them.