Anomaly in upcoming registry

[Randy Presuhn]

Hi -

> From: "Mark Davis ⌛" <mark at macchiato.com>
> To: "Doug Ewell" <doug at ewellic.org>
> Cc: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 3:58 PM
> Subject: Re: Anomaly in upcoming registry
...
> Second, there is a real use case. According to a good deal of feedback from
> native speakers in Google, what we call Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are
> really dialects of the one language -- according to the criteria of mutual
> comprehension. They are really just like the situation with "mo" and "ro".
> Had we had BCP 47 some time ago (and the right country boundaries), they
> would have been sh-RS (or maybe sh-Cyrl), sh-BA, sh-HR. Having "sh" as a
> macrolanguage recognizes that situation, and gives us a neutral general code
> to express the situation.
...

Another data point....
When I was in college, "Serbo-Croatian" was taught as
a single language with multiple (Cyrillic and Latin)
orthographies, accompanied by general comments on
differences in accent and regional lexical preferences.

Despite the high level of mutual intelligibility, the differences
are more substantial than those between "mo" and "ro", where
folks are hard-pressed to come up with any differences at all,
and the ones usually given (differences in lexical preferences,
which appear to be diminishing with time) aren't very persuasive.

Still, I agreee with your main point that this seems like a good case
for "macrolanguage".

Randy