Language Variant subtags for Sanskrit

[Caoimhin O Donnaile]

Michael said:

> I am tending to think that "classical" is a category that could and 
> should validly attach to a variety of prefixes.

The difficulty I could see with that is that there might be quite
a lot of discussion and clarification needed as to what "classical"
meant in the case of certain languages.  Which could make for
a very long Comments field attached to the subtag.  Or alternatively,
lots and lots of Comments fields, since I see that there can be
more than one of these, although the comments seem to attach to the
subtag itself rather than to particular prefix-subtag combinations.

To add to John and Kent's point that many varieties called "classical"
may be separate languages, one of the examples in your earlier
message was:

    -Classical Gaelic
      (language of the 13th to 18th c. Scottish Gaelic literature)

It looks to me as if that is already covered by language code ghc:

    http://multitree.linguistlist.org/codes/ghc
    http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ghc

So gd-classic would mean something different, the language of the
Gaelic Bible from roughly the year 1800 perhaps.  And ga-classic
would also mean something different - the language of Keating's
"Foras Feasa" (1634) perhaps:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Keating

although without clarification some people might take it to
refer to Gaelic of Dineen's dictionary (1904, 1927), predating the 
spelling reform and grammar standardization of the
"Caighdeàn Oifigiúil" in the 1950s.

    http://glg.csisdmz.ul.ie/

It looks to me (not sure whether I am right) as if the variant
subtags are in a bit of a limbo between being "atomic" and not
being "atomic".  The fact that the Description and Comments and
Added fields attach to the subtag rather than to a particular
prefix-subtag combination kind of implies that they generally
ought to be "atomic" (distinct for each prefix).

Caoimhín