Fire the programmer (was: Re: Appeal to ISO 639 RA in support of Elfdalian)

[Doug Ewell]

John Cowan replied to Shawn Steele:

>> IMO, if 5 letter codes, or any codes that break existing patterns,
>> are ever defined, we'd better have a really good reason.
>
> By that token, we'd still be back in the pure "xx-yy" era.

Not only no 3-letter subtags, but also no script subtags or variants or
extensions. I grant that it took us a long time to accept the idea of
extensions, and they are still really only used for CLDR, but the others
are fairly important and well-known.

We do have a really good reason. Assuming the 639-3 RA rejects the
appeal, all of the criteria specified in BCP 47 have been met for
defining a 5- (to 8-) letter subtag.

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸