Request for variant subtag fr 16th-c 17th-c Resubmitted!

[CE Whitehead]

Quoting these first:
"At 21:56 +0100 2006-12-13, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
>>if you want to specify the same language as Academie Francaise's 1694 
>>dictionary, I think the subtag "af1694" would be less prone to stimulating 
>>debate.
>
>"Just 1694 would be more or less the same as the German subtags, but I 
>don't mind.
>--
>"Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com"

My Response:
Hi, well I would not want to register every year, every dictionary though 
there are mainly two dictionaries from the 17th century.
Your subtag is quite specific nevertheless.
The language of the 1694 dictionary is very close to the language in the 
journal completed in 1685 by Nicholas de la Salle.  It is in working on that 
that I came up with the idea of the subtag.
French varies a bit over the 17th century; it actually seems to vary more 
than in the 16th century plus has the addition of new words from the 
Americas, most of which, but not all of which, are in the 1694 dictionary.
The division into centuries, while a bit arbitrary, seems to work for 16th 
and 17th century French.

(In the 16th century, stress-timing began to be eliminated from poetry as 
this was the beginning of the Renaissance and thus immediately there was a 
revival of syllable length--from classical languages--as the means for 
timing poetry; this changed the way French was read and pronounced and 
ultimately the way it was spelled; in the 17th century, there seems to be 
more not less variation and in addition, interest was reawakened in local 
folklore, in things other than classical literature; France's real 
colonialization of the Americas began in the 17th century as well, almost at 
the beginning of that century, so the century dates work quite nicely for 
this particular language;
my one regret is that I did not specify two prefixes for 16thc, fr and frm; 
should have done so; I can resubmit that)

In any case, as we can see quickly, I am talking about two periods and two 
tags; the first is the 16th the second the 17th century.

With language tags tending to encompass more than a single reference (the 
single tag fr certainly does; though it can be made a bit more specific with 
a country code)
I did not feel that my tags had to just refer to a single reference, though 
the 1694 dictionary is a primary reference for the 17th century.

--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com

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