Language for taxonomic names, redux

[Michael Everson]

On 24 Feb 2017, at 17:47, Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft.com> wrote:

>> I would also like other members of this list to be explicit about their support. misgivings,  or disapproval of the scheme. No plus-ones, and if you’re fence-sitting, say that explicitly too. Thanks. 
> 
> I'm not opposed in principle. 

Nor am I. 

> But I don't think a good case has been made for use.

Not quite, no. 

> (You want to style terms differently? You don't need a language tag for that. You want terms to be ignored by spellers? There are existing ways to do that, such as a private-use tag. You want to do both? You can use a private-use language tag for both the styling and spelling issues.)

Well, I don’t think a private-use tag is the right way to do it for a linguistic entity which is in fact used all over the world in all languages. I just wanted to see if the requester had done any work with groups who might well make use of this. Doesn’t seem to have, not on the Wikipedia, anyway. 

> The key issue in my mind is public, interoperable interchange: is this likely to be used to improve existing challenges in interoperability of publicly-interchanged information? Styling a web page does not entail a public language-info interchange operability issue. Making 3rd-party TTS tools behave in a particular way would, if there was any likelihood of such tools existing. But I haven't seen a good case made along that line.
> 
> I also don't think there's clarity about how to tag: as a language, as a variant of some particular language, or as variants of various languages.

It’s a variety of Latin, in my view. Even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_cucaracha_(moth). :-) 

Michael