Support of Old Church Slavic language sublocale in CLDR

[Aleksandr Andreev via CLDR-Users]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 2:32 PM, Соус-кун via CLDR-Users
<cldr-users at unicode.org> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> Two years ago I've openned the ticket
> https://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/9238 about adding separate sublocale
> for Old Church Slavic language within the "cu" CLDR locale.
> The ticked was closed for formal reasons, but I believe this issue needs
> further discussion.
>

As I wrote in the original ticket, in my view, the way to handle this
would be to separate "Old" Church Slavic (whatever is meant by this
term) from Church Slavic the way Ancient Greek has been separated from
modern Greek: grc is the ISO 639-2 code for Ancient Greek and ell or
gre are the ISO 639-2 codes for Modern Greek.

I write "whatever is meant by this term" to underline my general
concern that "Old" Church Slavic does not seem to be a well-defined
term. We've defined "Church Slavic" in CLDR to be the current
liturgical language used by the Russian Orthodox Church and other
Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Churches. (Variants can be specified
as cu_BG, cu_RU, cu_UA, etc.). This language has well documented norms
and a well-established user community.

By "Old" Church Slavonic I guess the questioner means the literary
language used in manuscripts around the 9th-10th century?

Is there a need for having this in CLDR as a separate locale? Does
CLDR even provide support for ancient languages? I don't see data in
CLDR for Latin, Ancient Greek, Avestan or Sanskrit, for example.

What additional functionality would be provided to the user community
by including "Old" Church Slavic as a separate locale?

> - Linguists consider 'Old Church Slavic' and 'Church Slavic' two different
> languanges (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic and
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Slavonic_language for reference).

The original ticket proposes adding Old Church Slavic data from the
Church Slavonic Wikipedia. How authoritative a source is this for
language data?

Also, if all that is needed is support for the Glagolitic script, we
could define cu_Glag and add data in Glagolitic there.

Cordially,

Aleksandr