Request for variant subtag fr 16th-c 17th-c

Michael Everson everson at evertype.com
Tue Dec 12 19:26:11 CET 2006


At 16:49 +0000 2006-12-12, CE Whitehead wrote:
>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.

Of course I am aware of that.

You have not addressed my concerns.

I think 16thc and 17thc are generic as eastern and western are, and 
the question about what to do with the other 19 centuries CE or any 
previous centuries has not been addressed. The question of what to do 
when a language form spans several centuries has not been addressed.

>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).

But these tags could be applied to anything.

My current view is that these proposed tags should be rejected.
-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com


More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list