No subject

atures.

-- Ken

On Apr 14, 2014, at 7:51 PM, James Clark <jjc at jclark.com> wrote:

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> On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 9:37 PM, Levantovsky, Vladimir <Vladimir.Levantov=
sky at monotype.com> wrote:
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> As far as ZHH for Chinese and its description are concerned, this was a c=
onscious change that was made in the 3rd edition working draft back in Febr=
uary 2013 - this is how the corresponding ISO language tag 'zho' is describ=
ed in the ISO 639 spec.
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> This argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.  Before this propo=
sed change, the Chinese-related entries in the language system tags table w=
ere as follows:
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> Chinese, Hong Kong SAR    ZHH    zho
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> Chinese Phonetic    ZHP    zho
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> Chinese Simplified    ZHS    zho
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> Chinese Traditional    ZHT    zho
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> Observe that:
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> - all 4 entries have 'zho' as their ISO language tag
> - the final character of the language system tag is mnemonic for the=20
> qualifier applied to "Chinese" (H for Hong Kong, P for Phonetic, S for=20
> Simplified, T for Traditional)
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> It is important to bear in mind that a "language system", as the term is =
used in the standard, is not the same as language; the standard defines a l=
anguage system as "a set of typographic conventions for how text in a given=
 script should be presented".  So here we have 4 different language systems=
 each specifying a different set of typographic conventions for the writing=
 a single language, namely Chinese.  Note that the ISO language tags do not=
 define the precise meaning of the language system: they are no more than t=
he tags of languages to which the language system might apply. (Indeed, the=
 ISO language tags column was only added to the OpenType spec in version 1.=
6.) It is the first column in the table that constitutes the definition of =
the language system tag.
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> ZHH thus has a clear, well-established meaning as a language system tag: =
it refers to the set of typographic conventions used for writing Chinese in=
 Hong Kong.  ZHH has been in place since OpenType 1.5.
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> Now, ZHH may not be a very useful tag: I don't know of any typographic co=
nventions used in Hong Kong beyond those that apply to Chinese in the tradi=
tional script generally.  However, it seems quite extraordinary to me to su=
ddenly make a major change in the well-established semantics of the tag.  T=
his should not be done without some really good reason.
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> Furthermore, this change could create real incompatibilities.  Up to now,=
 software would only apply the ZHH language system to text identified as Ch=
inese as used in Hong Kong.  In practical terms, text in HTML with lang=3Dz=
h-HK would use the ZHH tag, but text labelled with lang=3Dzh would not. Sim=
ilarly, fonts would use ZHH for features that were appropriate in Hong Kong=
 (which uses traditional characters).  If software now starts to implement =
the changed semantics of ZHH in combination with old fonts using the previo=
us semantics of ZHH, text labelled as generic Chinese will be displayed usi=
ng conventions appropriate for Hong Kong (ie traditional characters), where=
 it had previously been displayed using conventions appropriate for generic=
 Chinese (probably simplified characters).
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> James
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