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 _______________________________________________ Ltru mailing list Ltru at ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru
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