[cflsystems]

Ok here is the story. After looking in db directly the language variable in question was not found. It vanished.
Before I posted about this I was able to find it in admin and it was showing. This is a direct upgrade to 4.7.3. It looks like the upgrade did put all the info in the new store.
After changing settings and cache back and forth multiple times hundreds of language variables where deleted. This is not good. There is something wrong with that.

I copied them from the live site again, applied the patch provided. It seems to be working now.

BTW before applying the patch it still didn't work with the info present in db. It worked only after applying this patch so the patch is necessary.