Re: [Ietf-languages] Latin Sub tags

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As to ISO 639 and Latin and Greek, I cannot promise anything, as we are just starting with the new MA, and also as Janell has just a year ago replaced the previous registrar as SIL International, but I imagine that cleaning up such old not decided requests (of which I was not aware) would be one of the things the new MA should take up as its first tasks, besides new change requests.  

Although I am not a specialist in classical languages, I believe that these varieties of Latin need to be coded; whether as individual languages (with the possible consequence of making Latin into a macro-language) or as temporal varieties remains to be seen.  I would add ecclesiastical Latin to the list, although the differences to medieval Latin may be small and mainly in terms of pronunciation.  What is usually called "vulgar Latin" could be another candidate.

Best, Sebastian

-----Original Message-----
From: Ietf-languages <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Doug Ewell
Sent: Friday, 1 December, 2023 14:28
To: John Cowan <[e-mail]>
Cc: Hugh Paterson III <[e-mail]>; IETF Languages Discussion <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: [Ietf-languages] Latin Sub tags

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?

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

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