Subject: RE: [Ltru] Last call comments on LTRU registry andinitialization documents

From: "Peter Constable" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 15:47:08 -0700

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of John C
> Klensin

> 	Aside on the example above (LTRU participants can skip
> 	unless they want to check my logic): "en-Hang" and
> 	"en-Hant" would imply writing English in Korean Hangul
> 	or Traditional Chinese characters respectively.  In
> 	addition to those not exactly being common cases, it is
> 	not clear that they are feasible...

> 	Hangul is problematic in a different way.
> 	Unlike Chinese characters, it is definitely phonetic.
> 	But because it is rather carefully designed and
> 	structured around the needs of Korean, it is not clear
> 	to me, in my ignorance, that it could be used to
> 	represent the full range of English phonemes and
> 	syllables with reasonable accuracy.

Actually, that's not quite true. There are Korean linguists who have promoted the idea that Hangul script can be adapted for use for general phonemic transcription of languages. Thus, it is plausible that a user might have English data written with Hangul script.

This really is no different from the da-CO kinds of examples: they are not particularly useful because there is no actual variant of the given language associated with the given country, but only coincidentally, and in principle the state of affairs in human demographics could well change such as such a variant does actually exist. Just as there is no limit to what region a given language can be spoken by a significant population (given sufficient mobility), in principle there is no limit to what script can be used to write a given language (given sufficient ingenuity). 

The *only* difference for these cases in RFC 3066 is that generative use without requiring registration is sanctioned for country IDs ‎but not for script IDs. And that is not so by explicit design; is resulted simply because we weren't yet sure how script IDs should be integrated into the tags and the fact that ISO 15924 wasn't yet published.

Peter Constable

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