Re: [Ietf-languages] Latin Sub tags

[Doug Ewell <[e-mail]>]

John Cowan wrote:

>> [...] As such, [ISO 639-5 collection codes] usually have little
>> relevance to BCP 47 language tagging situations.
>
> That said, there are 116 collection codes in the BCP 47 world
> inherited from 639-2 (in the case of 'bh', Bihari languages, from
> 639-1), but they aren't very useful for BCP 47 use cases.

True, the collection codes that originated with other parts of 639 are no more useful for tagging than the ones introduced with 639-5. But Hugh had talked about 639-5, so I focused on that.

>> Again, the RA will consider each linguistic situation on its own, not
>> simply because it was done in the past for this language or not done
>> for that language.
>
> Indeed.  In particular, the stages of Greek cover a much wider range
> linguistically than the stages of Latin.  Cicero might have thought
> Mediaeval Latin was pretty barbarous, but he wouldn't have trouble
> understanding it.  That's a very different story from Modern Greek
> versus Classical Greek, much less Old Egyptian versus Coptic.

I think about Greek often with respect to this discussion of Latin varieties through time. ISO 639-3/RA received change requests for Medieval Greek in 2006, and for Ecclesiastical Greek and Katharevousa Greek in 2009, and they are still sitting in the RA’s “Pending” bucket as of December 2023. There are probably complexities we don’t know about for all of these, but the first in particular seems relevant: could change requests for Early, Classical, and Medieval Latin be held up for a prolonged period, as Medieval Greek has been?

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Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org