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

[Ciarán Ó Duibhín]

CE Whitehead wrote:
<<
Well actually the goal was ...
... to allow the page creator to determine whether the French was modern
enough to be considered modern French for his/her audience or needed to be
labelled as Middle French because of problems reading it.  (this is
important to students/persons learning French in particular, or to persons
who are not completely literate)...

Another reason for my request is that there are not too many differences in
readability between the more standardized late 16th century texts and the
less standardized 17th century texts I am dealing with, and I realized that
in many ways texts from these two periods (outside of the texts created in
the 17th century salon environment) can be treated as a  unit with the 17th
century texts less standardized...

I am hoping the tags will provide a way to indicate whether texts in these
historical varieties are left in the original language (how I prefer to get
my texts) or translated into modern French (the translations are quite
common online).
>>

IMO, the first para above shows how the choice between "frm" and "fr" (for a
common subtag) is principled, and not left to the "whim of the author".  As
I read it, it is based on a distinction between text which is intelligible
to the speaker of Modern French and text which is not (and this distinction
is made both for the 16th and the 17th centuries).  I think it is
over-stretching things to describe this as taking the distinction out of the
text itself and making it relative to the audience.

But I am struggling to see how the currently proposed (single-prefix) tags
will help with these objectives.  They are "frm-1606Nict" or "frm-16siecle";
"fr-1694acad" or "fr-17siecle"; and plain old "frm" and "fr".

How would the tag for a text, which is 16th century but modernizing, show
that it has something in common with Modern French? (your 1st para above)

How would the tag for a text, which is 17th century but archaising, show
that it has something in common with Medieval French? (your 1st para above)

How would the tags show that these two groups of texts, or parts of them,
have something in common with each other? (your 2nd para above)

How would you tag the difference between an archaising 17th century text and
its translation into Modern French?  How would you tag the difference (or
lack of it) between a modernising 16th century text and its translation into
Modern French? (your 3rd para above).

Ciarán Ó Duibhín.