Language for taxonomic names, redux

[Michael Everson]

On 24 Feb 2017, at 16:17, Mark Davis ☕️ <mark at macchiato.com> wrote:
> 
> The variant tags are designed for variants of languages, but even there there are limits. For some people, en-US-pinpenmg for "the variant of US English that uses the pin-pen merger" has merit to at least one person, but that kind of fine-grained usage for the variant subtags would devolve into chaos. 

True, but that’s for a particular dialect feature of a spoken language, which isn’t quite what’s being requested here. 

> And it is even goofier if you are not limited to variants of languages, but rather open it up to any category that someone, somewhere, thinks has merit. Pretty soon someone is wanting to tag technical terms used in dog breeding, and so on. Or tagging parts of speech: 'adjectiv', ... Or inflections: 'ergative', … 

Well, as slippery slopes go, maybe “Medical terminology” would be similar to this one but I don’t really think so. 

Michael