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

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Wed Jan 10 03:54:25 CET 2007


> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of John Cowan

> Caoimhin O Donnaile scripsit:
> 
> > I wonder whether they are remembering to include historic languages
> > when defining the macrolanguages?
> 
> So far no.

The question "are they remember to do this" assumes that they are actively engaged in designing and defining new entities, but they are not: all that has been done wrt macrolanguage entities thus far (and we're still processing some of them) is to try to make sense of what was already created before in ISO 639-2. In 639-2, "fra" is "French", meaning Modern French and not all historic varieties of French; "zh"/"zho" is "Chinese", and the only way to make sense of the multiple individual Chinese languages on the one hand and practical use of "zh"/"zho" in the past (including tags like zh-hakka, etc.) was to consider "zh"/"zho" a macrolanguage. We've just been dealing with legacy.



Peter Constable


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