Re: [Ietf-languages] Latin Sub tags

[John Cowan <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 5:44 PM Doug Ewell <[e-mail]> wrote:


> These are NOT sets of languages that are sometimes considered to be a
> single language. Nobody would say, for instance, “This document is written
> in ‘Bantu languages’” or “I need a ‘Bantu languages’ spell-checker.” As
> such, they 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.

So yes, it is possible and has been done. And it seems reasonable that,
> because the name “Latin” and the ISO 639 code elements and BCP 47 subtag
> for “Latin” have already been used, and are still in use, for all stages of
> Latin, this could be a candidate for this sort of conversion, if the new
> language code elements you suggest are approved. 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.