Proposed new variant subtag: pre1917

[Yury Tarasievich]

Thank you very much for this elaboration, indeed.

Like I said, I'm not fighting, but I still see 
some faults in subtags submitted -- and in your 
reasoning here.

On 09/14/2010 10:07 PM, Doug Ewell wrote:
...
>   From the standpoint of human readability, I see multiple problems with
> '1918'.

If '1918' is too general and uninformative, why 
not make it '1918new' (like, generally new)?

Possibly I'm talking from an insider's point of 
view (on history), but 'pinning' this 'just' on 
Shakhmatov seems misleading somewhat. 
Lunacharsky's was much better known name in 
connection with this reform. And even while the 
year might be argued on being 1917 or 1918, the 
contemporaries associated this change with other 
French-revolution-like cultural changes, like 
Gregorian calendar and decree time.

> First, there is no indication that the denoted variety is orthographic
...
Why are you saying that? Retelling the point, 
the decree was 'abolishing the unnecessary 
letters, with which working masses had to 
struggle for centuries to get literate'. Loosely 
quoting Bunin: 'I won't write in this new 
orthography even if archangel Gabriel brought it 
to me'. There was even novel published, named 
'Orthography' and referring to the events.

...
> I don't have any real preference between 'petrine' and 'grazhdan' and
> 'peter', which is why I asked Avram what his preference was.  I suppose
> the *really* clueless could interpret "ru-peter" as meaning Russian as
> spoken by Peter Constable, or perhaps Peter Griffin, but that is well
> beyond our ability to control.

Like Michael said, 'petrine' pertains to the 
religious context (apostl's name). I'm no 
indicator, but it seems to me that it's the use 
of this to refer to the emperor Peter that would 
confuse matters.

-Yury