Subject: Re: [Ltru] Mail regarding draft-ietf-ltru-4646bis and draft-ietf-ltru-matching

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2019 15:11:28 -0700

Florian Rivoal wrote:
 
> nb is the preferred form of grandfathered+deprecated no-bok, nn of
> no-nyn, and no is marked as a macrolanguage. Why do they have not
> extlang?
 
One possible reason, although it might not be "the" reason — I would
have to look into the mail archives to see if this was raised — was
that extlangs and their corresponding primary language subtags have to
be identical, and extlangs can't be two letters long, because then they
would be region subtags.
 
It might be worth noting that "no-bok" and "no-nyn" aren't real
extlangs, despite looking like them. They were created under the RFC
1766/3066 whole-tag registration model, back in 1995, before ISO 639
added code elements [nb] and [nn] in 2000. That's why they are
grandfathered (because the tags don't mean what breaking them apart into
subtags would indicate) and deprecated (because there are regular
subtags that are preferred).
 
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org