Subject: [Ltru] RE: Generic variant subtags in RFC 3066bis

From: "Peter Constable" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 15:08:22 -0700

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:ietf-languages-
> [email-masked]] On Behalf Of John Cowan

> When the RFC 3066bis registry is up and running, I intend to propose
some
> highly generic variant subtags which may be used with many languages.
> Some examples that come to mind are -northern, -southern, -eastern,
-western,
> and -central for geographical dialects; -ancient and -middle for
earlier
> versions of languages (-old being too short);

Note that ISO 639 does distinguish historic varieties at a low level of
granularity. E.g., 

ang = Old English (ca. 450 - 1100)
enm = Middle English (1100 - 1500)
eng = (Modern) English (1500 - present)

ISO 639-3 will continue using this approach; the draft code table has 34
"Old" entries and 14 "Middle" entries. The criterion for inclusion is
that there candidate historic language must have a body of literature
and must be treated as distinct from other historic stages by the
scholarly community.

> and -highreg, -midreg, and -lowreg
> for sociolinguistic registers.

Is this really a commonly-used basis for distinction between
sociolinguistic registers?

Peter Constable

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---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 19:52:35 -0700

Hi -

I'm surprised that this message made it to the [email-masked] list,
given that it and its predecessors weren't sent to that address.

Randy

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Constable" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2005 3:08 PM
Subject: [Ltru] RE: Generic variant subtags in RFC 3066bis

some
-western,
earlier

Peter Constable