Subject: Re: [Ltru] Fw: I-D Action:draft-burnett-pronunciation-alphabet-registry-00.txt

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2009 21:28:51 -0700

Didn't notice this thread until now, as I had kind of stopped watching 
for LTRU traffic.

"Phillips, Addison" <addison at amazon dot com> wrote:

> Actually, I spoke with the authors (they represent the W3C SSML 
> [Speech Synthesis Markup Language] Working Group) last month at W3C 
> TPAC in Santa Clara. The problem they are trying to solve looks 
> superficially like a job for language tags and my first advice to them 
> was to consider registration of subtags, use of language tags, or 
> creation of an extension. However they had reasons to seek a separate 
> registry which didn't seem unreasonable to me at the time.
>
> The main thing is that pronunciation schemes tend to be vendor 
> specific and are not necessarily transcriptions or, in fact, even 
> useful outside the speech synthesis process. It seems unlikely to me 
> that the language subtag registry would take in a wide variety of 
> these things, especially the vendor-specific variations.

So of course I am left to wonder why the BCP 47 extension mechanism 
wouldn't have been just a perfect solution:

    cmn-p-pinyin-2001
    yue-p-jyutping
    ja-p-jeita
    etc.

The SSML WG could still develop and maintain their own registry, 
independent of the LSR, but subject to the constraints in RFC 5646, 
Section 3.7, which are pretty reasonable.  The WG already seems to have 
most of the necessary concepts and infrastructure.  I'd be interested to 
know what part of "creation of an extension" didn't meet their needs.

> I am in receipt of a request to discuss this at today's W3C 
> Internationalization WG call, a non-IETF organization may (or may not) 
> discourage this or at least look further into it.

And I'd be interested to know how that turned out.

--
Doug Ewell  |  Thornton, Colorado, USA  |  http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14  |  ietf-languages @ http://is.gd/2kf0s