Language for taxonomic names, redux

[Arthur Reutenauer]

> What's the problem with having a tag for that taxonomy thing? That's a
> highly specialised language, Latin-derived.

  As at least Michael, Doug, and I already tried to point out, “that
taxonomy thing” is most definitely not a language in any meaning of the
term.  It is a specialised *vocabulary*.  I’m not aware of any language
or variant currently in the subtag registery that is defined merely by a
list of terms.  Specialised orthographies, to which you allude below,
are often defined by reference to a particular dictionary, but that
doesn’t mean that only the words in that dictionary fall under the
subtag.

> I see all kinds of requirements appearing suddenly: 'what about country
> codes' or 'what about speech synthesisers'.
> Are those really relevant to the process?

  These are not requirements, it was simply points raised during the
discussion.  Country codes were raised by Michael in reaction to Andy’s
in my opinion outlandish claim that binomial names were to be pronounced
the same in all languages, and speech synthesis was brought by Andy
himself in his initial email this year, and led to some questions (how
would it work?).

> What about those requirements with regard to some of the codes already
> assigned? E.g., codes for obsolete orthographies (some of the French, I
> believe?). Should those codes be scrapped? How about the primitive (not
> 'functionally complete' -- don't know that term in English) languages?

 If you mean pidgins, they do have actual language codes, usually in ISO
639-3.

	Best,

		Arthur