[tei-council] biblscope and imprint

[Martin Holmes]

The W3C guide to using language subtags actually uses ru-Latn as the 
specific example for script subtags:

"Script subtags should only be used as part of a language tag when the 
script adds some useful distinguishing information to the tag. Usually 
this is because a language is written in more than one script or because 
the content has been transcribed into a script that is unusual to the 
language (so one might tag Russian transcribed into the Latin script 
with a tag such as ru-Latn)."

<http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-choosing-language-tags>

So I think Kevin might be misunderstanding BCP 47, and ru-Latn should be 
used.

Cheers,
Martin

On 12-11-04 09:49 PM, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
> On 11/4/12 7:52 AM, Lou Burnard wrote:
>> Firstly the comment that using "ru" for Russian transliterated in Roman
>> characters is simply "underspecified" seems to me rather to miss the
>> point. If I see something in a Unicode document which says it has
>> xml:lang="ru" I expect to see proper Russian Unicode characters.
>
> Perhaps.  I meant that while you might think that, it wasn't clear to me
> that the semantics of @xml:lang license that inference.  However, once I
> looked at BCP 47 and the discussion of "suppress script" further, I
> think it might indeed license Lou's inference.
>
>> Secondly, even if I am prepared to accept Romanized versions of those
>> characters and figure out for myself what the Russian should have been,
>> this is not entirely easy. There are several different (Wikipedia lists
>> ten) possible Romanization schemes, which vary quite considerably. In
>> some, for example, the sequence "ye" stands for the Russian letter that
>> looks like a Roman "e"; in others this character is represented by "e",
>> unless it is iotated by a preceding soft sign. So generating a correct
>> Cyrillic version of this citation isn't easy, and neither is deciding
>> which scheme we're dealing with here!
>
> BCP 47 allows for registering of variant subtags for systems of
> transliteration, but it does not require this.  However, per the
> discussion of "suppress script", it seems you effectively need to for
> transliteration.
>
> This is puzzling.
>
>> Thirdly, this particular example is actually taken verbatim from a
>> rather elderly ISO standard on bibliographic reference (ISO 690, 1987).
>>     Hence we probably should not mess with its representation at all.
>
> I fully agree that as long as we are citing a citation in a source
> document, we shouldn't go de-transliterating it!
>
>   >  (You
>> can see it cited as a example in the Wikipedia entry for ISO_690,
>> curiously enough).
>
> I imagine that someone writing or improving the Wikipedia article on ISO
> 690 googled around to see what they could find and stumbled upon the
> Guidelines ...
>
>> My guess, but I defer to the Russian expert in our midst, is that this
>> uses the now deprecated ISO/R:1968 but without access to the original,
>> it's hard to be sure, and without being sure I'd rather not try to
>> convert it into proper Russian.
>
> Well, it looks like Lou not only tried, but as your resident Russian
> expert I can say that he also succeeded.
>
>> All of which I suppose we can side-step cheerfully, by saying "ru-Latn",
>> even though this particular combination isn't actually proposed in
>> http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry, and even
>> though this won't help anyone who *does* want to see the original title
>> as it should have been presented!
>
> I, like Martin in a later message, used to think that BCP 47 allowed for
> the various types of tags to be combined as you see fit, meaning that
> "ru-Latn" would be allowed.  But a closer reading of BCP 47 now makes me
> think that you can only use things in the IANA registry unless you use a
> private use subtag.
>
> We could bring in Syd Bauman or Deborah Anderson to help us sort this
> out, or we could take a shortcut by simply removing the @xml:lang on
> this transliterated title.
>
> --Kevin
>

-- 
Martin Holmes
mholmes at uvic.ca
UVic Humanities Computing and Media Centre