Registration request: fonkirsh

LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM

1. Name of requester: Sascha Brawer
2. E-mail address of requester: [email protected]
3. Record Requested:

      Type: variant
      Subtag: fonkirsh
      Description: Kirshenbaum Phonetic Alphabet

4. Intended meaning of the subtag:
Phonetic transcription according to the Kirshenbaum Phonetic Alphabet.

5. Reference to published description of the language (book or article):
https://web.archive.org/web/20160419125856/http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/ascii-ipa.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirshenbaum

6. Any other relevant information:
The Kirshenbaum phonetic alphabet was commonly used in Usenet until the
mid-1990s. In the meantime, IPA [fonipa] and X-Sampa [fonxsamp] have become
more popular as transcription systems; but there’s still occasional use of
the Kirschenbaum notation. For example, the application programming
interface of the espeak open-source text-to-speech synthesis system accepts
phonemic input in Kirshenbaum transcription. The project will likely
modernize its API at some point; but in order to not break old clients, the
software will need some identifier for the phonetic alphabet.

Instead of registering a BCP47 variant subtag for the Kirshenbaum alphabet,
an alternative might be tagging such content with BCP47 extension T. In
that case, English content in the Kirshenbaum phonetic alphabet would
probably be tagged as “en-fonipa-t-d0-fonkirsh”. If the language wasn’t
known, the tag would be “und-fonipa-t-d0-fonkirsh”. (Assuming, of course,
that we’d register a BCP47 extension T subtag into Unicode’s registry).

In my personal opinion, the Kirshenbaum notation was widespread enough in
the 1990s to register an official identifier, even if usage has become rare
today. But I’ve no opinions on whether it should be in BCP47 versus
BCP47-T. What do others think?

— Sascha

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