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

["Phillips, Addison" <addison at amazon.com>]

Hi,

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.

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.

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ltru-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:ltru-bounces at ietf.org] On
> Behalf Of Randy Presuhn
> Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 10:45 PM
> To: LTRU Working Group
> Subject: Re: [Ltru] Fw: I-D Action:draft-burnett-pronunciation-
> alphabet-registry-00.txt
> 
> Hi -
> 
> > From: "John Cowan" <cowan at ccil.org>
> > To: "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn at mindspring.com>
> > Cc: "LTRU Working Group" <ltru at ietf.org>
> > Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 1:02 PM
> > Subject: Re: [Ltru] Fw: I-D Action:draft-burnett-pronunciation-
> alphabet-registry-00.txt
> ...
> > This effort seems singularly pointless and duplicative, since
> these
> > Pronouncing Alphabets are just romanization systems, and we
> already
> > register those as variant subtags.
> >
> > Is there any IETF-ly organizational method of discouraging this?
> ...
> 
> My suggestion would be to engage directly with the authors,
> and to perhaps request use cases (for potential inclusion in
> the document) to clarify whether these are in fact "just
> romanization
> systems", and whether a (select subset of) language tags could
> provide the same functionality or not.  It's really important to
> get clarification (and to make the draft clear) about this point.
> 
> (FWIW, I don't see why a pronouncing alphavet would *necessarily*
> be a romanization system.)
> 
> The next point of input would be to alert an Area Diretor (e.g.
> Alexey Melnikov) so that the IESG would be aware of potential
> concerns, particularly potential overlap with existing IETF BCP.
> 
> Randy
> 
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