Request for variant subtag fr 16th-c 17th-c
CE Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com
Tue Dec 12 17:49:48 CET 2006
Hi. I'm requesting the tag for French, and possibly for English and
not for Old English or Esperanto if you look at the prefix (Old
English was not spoken in the 16th century; that was Elizabethan
English a variant of modern English that was spoken at the end of the
16th and 17th centuries; Shakespeare's plays supposedly
'standardized' the English language which was quite varied (Chaucer's
dialect was just one of the many dialects spoken in the 13th-14th
centuries, the period of Middle English.
The way I see it we need tags to specify the period in which the
language was spoken as language varies over time; 17th century works
very nicely for 17th century French which can be treated together to
some degree though there is still quite a bit of variation in the
language then; 16th century is an alternative tag for 16th century
French, which is accessible to modern French speakers but is really
still Middle French (this tag allows 16th century French to be tagged
as modern but identified as a variant so that 16th century French
literature will come up in a search for literature in French without
the seeker's having to ask for literature in a separate language,
Middle French; maybe this second tag should be 14thto16thc to include
Middle French which did vary over time and get more modern which is
why for the time being I just requested a 16th-c tag for this single
century).
French does not span the centuries in any sense as a constant fixed
language; languages change over time and that is the point of having
a tag to identify the century. French does not actually stabilize as
modern French until the 18th century! It's not stable in the 17th
century! There are a few varieties of the language going around but
there are peculiarities in the language which distinguish it from
Modern French and which come from Middle French; in addition there
are new words that come from the Americas ("canot" for canoe; and so
on).
We first get modern French in the 17th century somewhere towards the
middle maybe even with the establishment of the Academie Francaise
and its early efforts at making the language uniform. But it's not
quite initially the modern French spoken today and varies between
'Middle' and 'Modern' French and there is quite a bit of
non-uniformity.
French as a language actually dates to the Middle Ages (but it's not
modern French), to the time of Roland; before that you know we do not
have French, we have Gaulish, Latin, Vulgar Latin, Aquitainian, and
Arabic among others (Arabic goes back a bit further as its writing
system and the standardized form of the language date to at least 0
A.D.; I'm not an expert on the time period in which Arabic was first
established though.
In the Middle Ages we have Old French (langue d'oeil), Old Occitan
(langue d'oc), Catalan (close to Occitan), Gallego Portuguese,
Mozarabic (combinations of Romance, mainly Spanish, and Arabic), and
surprisingly to some Old Spanish too, plus of course Vulgar Latin.
--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com
>From: Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com>
>To: IETF Languages Discussion <ietf-languages at iana.org>
>Subject: Re: Request for variant subtag fr 16th-c 17th-c
>Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:10:38 +0000
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>
>I am inclined to think that "16th-century" is not a very good
>subtag. What do we do when we have a language form that spans two
>centuries? Shall we register twenty of these for the Common Era, and
>ten or so for Before the Common Era? What about writing systems or
>languages that span millennia?
>
>What would the meaning be for addig 16th-century to the language tag
>for Old English or Esperanto?
>--
>Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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