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

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 01:56:11PM -0500,
 CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail.com> wrote 
 a message of 76 lines which said:

> but I do tend to abhor the linguists' classification scheme of
> various languages in General; for example; I do not agree that
> Farsi/Persian is really Indo-European; so much of it is related to
> languages in the 'Altaic' group.

Warning: this is getting seriously slippery. It is *not* up to the
IETF to fix or discuss the work of linguists, IETF does not have the
expertise or authority to do so.

ISO 639, for instance, is certainly not without defaults but if we
attempt to fix them we indeed will open a big can of worms.

The entire point of the language subtag registry is to build on
existing (even if imperfect) registries, not to start our own.

> but even with Breton snugly in the Celtic family, we still have
> Occitan/Provencal in the South and the grammar in these is so
> clearly Old French but then other elements are closer to say Catalan
> so which group it goes with is a tough call.

Occitan (actually a macro-language: people speaking Provencal and
Gascon do not understand each other) is a different language from
French. The only thing "french" about Occitan is that it is spoken
mostly in France.

> But I do hope that someday we can get some more macro-languages,
> including a French one,

I fail to see what it would cover: languages spoken in France? They
may have no real connections (Occitan and French are close but Breton
or Alsacian are very different).