Review period; Nepali and Oriya

[John Cowan]

Gordon P. Hemsley scripsit:

> I suppose that makes sense. I'd been viewing both extlangs and
> macrolanguages as simply for backwards compatibility, but it does make
> a lot of sense to also maintain codes for linguistic concepts that we
> know are going to persist (like the ideas of "Chinese" and "Arabic").

Macrolanguages are created (by the Registration Authority) when a group
of languages has a single name and is for some purposes treated as a
single entity.

To create extlang tags for a macrolanguage, we have to further decide
(as Doug says) that the macrolanguage _tag_ has been used to cover more
than one variety of the language.  Often, we don't do this because we
don't think it's the case.  Data, however, is hard to come by.

> In that case, it might be best to register them simply for
> completeness's sake. 

We don't want to do that: we introduce extlang tags only when there's
a need for them above and beyond registering the macrolanguage.

-- 
Where the wombat has walked,            John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org>
it will inevitably walk again.          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
   (even through brick walls!)