Proposed new variant subtag: pre1917

[Michael Everson]

On 8 Sep 2010, at 08:44, Avram Lyon wrote:

> For my purposes, I really just need to be able to mark texts that use the post-1917 orthography, but since that is the current orthography, I can't very well insist that the tagging of all Russian texts produced today employ a variant subtag.


I strongly, strongly, recommend that you propose subtags for what the non-post-1917 orthographies ARE, not a subtag for what modern orthography is NOT. I know, for your purposes you may just need to be able to say "not modern" but our subtags don't work negatively.

> The problem is that there are additional orthographic changes in the 18th century, after Peter's 1708 reforms, as some of the letters abolished in 1708 were re-added by the mid-1700s. Additionally, more letters fell into disuse before 1917. 


So you have Peter 1708, something 1750, and something with more disused letters, in addition to modern post-1917 orthography. So you need three subtags.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/