Language for taxonomic names, redux

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Tue Feb 21 20:50:42 CET 2017


Andy Mabbett wrote:

> Some 14 years(!) ago, I raised the issue of a language code for
> marking up the taxonomic names of living things:
>
> http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2003-February/000574.html
>
> But that came to nothing.

Actually, it was considered rather extensively on the list, and Michael
made a formal decision in
http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2003-February/000582.html
:

"Scientific Latin is not a dialect of Latin. It has no verbs. No
pronouns. No phonemes or grammatical elements which differ from ordinary
Latin.

"Scientific Latin is a long list of terms not generally found in
Latin-English dictionaries. It's a glossary.

"I am going to reject this one."

I would think that the need today would be to demonstrate that this
meets the criteria in Section 3.6 of RFC 5646, which didn't exist 14
years ago:

"Dialect or other divisions or variations within a language, its
orthography, writing system, regional or historical usage,
transliteration or other transformation, or distinguishing variation MAY
be registered as variant subtags."
 
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org



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