Kent Karlsson <kent dot karlsson14 at comhem dot se> wrote:
One thing for which there was NEVER any consensus was to pick individual encompassed languages to be extlangs based on whether there was a corresponding "extlangish" grandfathered tag. That would make "cmn" an extlang but not "cdo". That way lies complete madness.Not an argument for picking individual extlang subtags. But as I read the arguments, it has been a motivation for picking certain primary laguage subtags to get extlang subtags: the backwards compatibility argument for extlang support. And that really only applies to 'zh', very very weakly to 'sgn' (I'd say not at all, but...), and not at all to 'ar' or any other primary language subtags.
It's true that RFC 1766/3066 tags were registered in the form "zh-something", and that some of these tags syntactically resemble language-extlang pairs and others resemble language-variant pairs. I would say this is more an artifact of the macrolanguage nature of Chinese -- sometimes it is considered a single language, as in ISO 639-1 and -2, while other times it is considered a family of languages -- rather than an attempt to maintain compatibility with the "extlangish" tags.
As for the other prefix languages, none of the proposed "sgn-something" extlang combinations is compatible with the registered tags, and there are no registered tags in "ar" or the other four languages, so I wouldn't say there is any backward compatibility argument at all.
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