Early Modern English

Mark Davis ☕ mark at macchiato.com
Fri Jan 13 02:19:42 CET 2012


As far as I'm concerned, it does have the same semantic: the middle (early,
etc) form of the primary language.

Mark
*— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —*
*
*
*
[https://plus.google.com/114199149796022210033]
*



On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 14:13, Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:

> Mark Davis ☕ <mark at macchiato dot com> wrote:
>
> > Choosing such names, in my opinion, just is pointlessly obscure for
> > users of BCP47, and make-work for this committee. It would be far
> > better to have understandable names like:
> >
> > en-middle
>
> Hypothetically, of course, since we are talking about Early Modern
> English and not Middle English ('enm').
>
> > Initially have a prefix of 'en' and then have the description be:
> >
> > For English, the period from YYY to ZZZ
> > // or whatever is the appropriate description
> >
> > As additional languages are added, more prefixes and descriptions can
> > be added. So in the future we could add :
> >
> > For Italian, the period from WWW to UUU
> > // or whatever is the appropriate description
>
> BCP 47, Section 3.5 (page 44) says:
>
>  Requests to add a 'Prefix' field to a variant subtag that imply a
>  different semantic meaning SHOULD be rejected. For example, a
>  request to add the prefix "de" to the subtag '1994' so that the tag
>  "de-1994" represented some German dialect or orthographic form would
>  be rejected. The '1994' subtag represents a particular Slovenian
>  orthography, and the additional registration would change or blur the
>  semantic meaning assigned to the subtag. A separate subtag SHOULD be
>  proposed instead.
>
> A subtag like 'earlymod' that could indicate either "Early Modern
> English" or "Early Modern Italian" would have two completely different
> meanings, even if the time frames for Early Modern English and Early
> Modern Italian happened to be identical. This is why we don't have
> "hy-eastern" and "hy-western". (True generic variants like 'fonipa'
> are a different story, since 'fonipa' always means "written in IPA"
> regardless of prefix.)
>
> That said, I do wish we could somehow embody the concept of "Early
> Modern" in the name of the subtag under discussion. As Sean said, people
> who deal with this particular language variety think in terms of "Early
> Modern English", not Shakespearean English or Spenserian English or King
> James Bible English. But in the end, it might be better to have this
> subtag registered with an obscure or even misleading name than not
> registered at all because we can't agree on a name.
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14
> www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell ­
>
>
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