[css-ruby] Incorrect language tags in the source file?

[xfq]

In the glossary of css-ruby, the terms are marked as lang="zh/ko/ja", although they're written in English.

Source file:

csswg-drafts/css-ruby-1/Overview.bs

Lines 1487 to 1529 in c5115ea

	<h2 id="glossary">
	Glossary</h2>
	<dl>
	<dt id="g-bopomofo" lang="zh">Bopomofo
	<dd>37 characters and 4 tone markings used as phonetics in Chinese,
	especially standard Mandarin.
	<p class="note">
	Note that the user agent is responsible for ensuring the correct relative alignment and positioning of the glyphs,
	including bopomofo tone marks, when displaying text,
	whether it occurs in ruby annotations or as normal inline text.
	Bopomofo Tone marks are spacing characters that occur (in memory) at the end of the ruby text for each base character.
	They are usually displayed in a separate column to the right of or above the bopomofo characters,
	and the position of the tone mark depends on the number of characters in the syllable.
	One tone mark, however, is placed before the bopomofo, not over it.
	<!-- See Taiwanese requirements doc for EPUB at http://epub-revision.googlecode.com/files/EGLS_TW_eng.ppt -->
	<dt id="g-hanja" lang="ko">Hanja
	<dd>Subset of the Korean writing system that utilizes ideographic
	characters borrowed or adapted from the Chinese writing system. Also see
	<a href="#g-kanji"><span lang="ja">Kanji</span></a>.</dd>
	<dt id="g-hiragana" lang="ja">Hiragana
	<dd>Japanese syllabic script, or character of that script. Rounded and
	cursive in appearance. Subset of the Japanese writing system, used together
	with kanji and katakana. In recent times, mostly used to write Japanese
	words when kanji are not available or appropriate, and word endings and
	particles. Also see <a
	href="#g-katakana"><span lang="ja">Katakana</span></a>.</dd>
	<dt id="g-ideogram">Ideograph
	<dd>A character that is used to represent an idea, word, or word component,
	in contrast to a character from an alphabetic or syllabic script. The most
	well-known ideographic script is used (with some variation) in East Asia
	(China, Japan, Korea,...).</dd>
	<dt id="g-kana" lang="ja">Kana
	<dd>Collective term for hiragana and katakana.</dd>
	<dt id="g-kanji">Kanji
	<dd>Japanese term for ideographs; ideographs used in Japanese. Subset of the
	Japanese writing system, used together with hiragana and katakana. Also see <a
	href="#g-hanja"><span lang="ko">Hanja</span></a>.</dd>
	<dt id="g-katakana" lang="ja">Katakana
	<dd>Japanese syllabic script, or character of that script. Angular in
	appearance. Subset of the Japanese writing system,&nbsp; used together with
	kanji and hiragana. In recent times, mainly used to write foreign words. Also see <a
	href="#g-hiragana"><span lang="ja">Hiragana</span></a>.</dd>
	</dl>

[upsuper]

Yeah... I see no reason why they need to be marked that way.

[upsuper]

They are not really English, though. Strictly speaking they are romanization of words in those languages. Not sure how they should be marked.

[heycam]

You could use zh-Latn or zh-Latn-pinyin I guess.

[heycam]

(For the first one, at least. I didn't look up in http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-registry what script names to use in the other languages.)

[frivoal]

I believe zh-Latn , ja-Latn and ko-Latn would be correct.

[r12a]

I think this is one of the scenarios where language tagging is not clear-cut, and very much falls back on the question: "What effect are you hoping to achieve by tagging for language?" (Or, actually, here perhaps what effect do you not want to produce?) Here's my 2p:

If you label these terms as described above you'll find that the browser applies different CJK fonts to the text unless overridden by styling (not the case here), which to me looks quite odd because they aren't usually written that way in the native language either. For myself, i see these as technical terms used in English that happen to be derived from CJK terms. I wouldn't put any language tag on them, because:
a. i don't know what that would achieve,
b. actually it can be detrimental in terms of styling

[frivoal]

Arguably, UAs ought to be responding to the full language tag, including the writing-system, and not switch to Chinese if it sees lang="zh-Latn". However, even if that were true, I now think it's still be wrong to tag them that way: if we think a a screen reader instead, we wouldn't expect it to switch to a Chinese voice when reading "bopomofo". The document is in English and to be read / listened to by English speakers, and there's no benefit in switching to Chinese phonetics.

So I agree with @r12a: these are better seen technical terms used in English that happen to be derived from CJK terms, best left without a language tag.