Proposed new variant subtag: pre1917

[Thorgeir Holm]

  2010/9/15 Yury Tarasievich <yury.tarasievich at gmail.com>:
>> Yers. Indeed, my argument was that if anybody's name *at all* should appear
>> in such subtag, it should be Lunacharsky's. However, my broader argument was
>> that attributing those changes (long talked about, ripe for introduction,
>> etc.) to any single person would be somewhat misleading. Why not '1918new',
>> at that? '1918decree', even?
Variant subtags could be attached to any language. A year is not 
particular to any language, whereas names usually are. As an example, if 
I had proposed the subtag '1917' for 'nn', it could have been used with 
'nb' as well, seeing that also this language had a 1917 spelling reform, 
or even with 'no', creating the ambiguous 'no-1917'.

Years do have a benefit, though, in being more neutral if there are 
difficulties in deciding what name is most appropriate. But in this case 
I would suggest adding the language in question, i.e.:

ru1918

and used like this: ru-ru1918

This would allow other languages to use the 1918 part as well.

Regards,
Thorgeir Holm