Re: Simplified or traditional for each Chinese macrolanguage

On Wed, Jul 27, 2016, at 02:09 PM, Ambrose LI wrote:
> zh defaults to simplified, right? I assume zh-cmn isn't really that
> common? Maybe we need to tell people to just skip tagging text as
> Mandarin as use zh-cmn-hant and zh-cmn-hans instead.
> 
> But come to think about it, I actually like the idea of treating
> Mandarin as unknown, but I think the semantics shouldn't be "fallback
> to use the system setting", but something more like "inherit if
> possible, else fall back to the system setting".
> 
> What I have in mind is a use case to the effect of
> 
>     <html lang=zh-hant>
>     [...] We call this <span lang=zh-yue>xxx</span>. However, in
> Mandarin the same thing is called <span lang=zh-cmn>yyy</span>.
> 
> (Obviously, this would also apply to other dialects. For example, in a
> simplified Chinese text describing language differences, a term tagged
> zh-yue is most likely also in simplified Chinese, not traditional
> Chinese.)
> 
> There are obviously other possibilities, such as an entire audio
> transcript tagged as "Mandarin". In this scenario there would be no
> script to inherit from and we'll probably have to guess.
> 
> Thoughts?

I don't think we currently have any existing mechanism doing this, and I
don't think it's worth adding for these rarely-used tags.

> >> FYI, Wikipedia[1] already uses lzh", without script.
> >
> > If we use Wikipedia as the criterion, the list would significantly change.
> > Basically as far as I can see, Wikipedia uses Traditional Chinese in almost
> > every Chinese languages it has a version for. But I suspect that most of
> > those Wikipedia are built by language enthusiasts, and not used by people in
> > general, so I tend not to pick that as a criterion.
> 
> I only know the zh, lzh, and yue versions. FWIW, IMHO traditional for
> lzh makes a lot of sense because mapping back from simplified to
> traditional is problematic. That's true for zh as well but I guess
> since so many people use simplified these days accepting simplified is
> unavoidable.

There are also:
* Gan: https://gan.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B0%81%E9%9D%A2
* Hakka: https://hak.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A8u-Ya%CC%8Dp
* Min Dong: https://cdo.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%A0%AD%E9%A0%81
* Min Nan: https://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A2u-ia%CC%8Dh
* Wu: https://wuu.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B0%81%E9%9D%A2

I doubt their value, though.

- Xidorn

Received on Wednesday, 27 July 2016 04:57:57 UTC