Request for variant subtag fr 16th-c 17th-c RESUBMISSION

[Ciarán Ó Duibhín]

CE Whitehead wrote:

> >[John Cowan]
> >In any case, where languages encompassed by a macrolanguage already
> >have 639-1/639-2 codes, they will remain language subtags and not become
> >extlang subtags.  So frx-frm would be equally bad.
>
> That means I gather that we will not be able to use fro or frm or any
other
> language with an existing subtag if a French macro-language were created;
we
> would have to create a whole new set of subtags?  As we could not extend
the
> use of these.

I take John to be saying that fro and frm are language codes and could not
be used as subtags of a French macrolanguage.  That seems OK to me.

But I hope it would be possible, given a French macrolanguage, to create any
number of subtags, some of which might have the same meaning as fro or frm,
but would have to be differently named.  Since the rules for subtag names
are more flexible, we could have frx-ancien or frx-moyen (the latter subtag
name once mentioned by CE, I think) and these are so much more confortable
that we might well find the language codes fro and frm being deprecated in
the distant future.

But as Doug said, we mustn't get too far ahead of ourselves, there is no
certainty that we will get a French macrolanguage.

Ciarán Ó Duibhín.