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Dear friends,<br>
things are getting complicated. Yesterday I loaded the new version
3.0 of the babel-latin support for the Latin Language, that maakes
use of two different sets of hyphenation patterns.<br>
<br>
I called these two sets of patterns hyph-la.tex (for Modern and
medieval Latin and for consistence with the hyphenation patterns
that are being used in the past 15 years or so -- the name
hyph-la.tex has been created a few years ago when babel and
polyglossia were reorganised) and hyph-lac.tex (for classic Latin).<br>
<br>
Ih had to do so because the hyphenation rules used by modern
scholars are different; the spelling of the three variants is
different, but one pattern set can accomodate both modern and
medieval Latin, while such procedure was impossible with classic
Latin; I had to work quite a lot to produce the classic Latin
patterns, because the rules aro so incompatible that a new different
pattern set is required. Just to make an example the word
transubstantialis is hyphenated as tran-sub-stan-tia-lis with
modern/medieval latin patterns and as tran-subs-tan-ti-a-lis with
classic latin patterns.<br>
<br>
I considered that the tags la and lac were sufficient to
distinguish la(modern&medieval) from la(classic). I was not
aware of the existance of special tags and subtags for the various
languages as Mojca showed me through the link: <br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-registry">http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-registry</a><br>
<br>
The contents of that language-subtag-registry file is a little
misterious for me; neverthelss I think I made a reasonable
suggestion by proposing the addition of<br>
<br>
<pre wrap=""><big>%%
Type: variant
Subtag: classic
Description: Classic Latin
Added: 2014-06-03
Prefix: la
</big></pre>
<big>but the overall correspondece on this topic shows that a subtag
classic may not be acceptable with the prefix la.<br>
<br>
OK. And what about tags ans subtags for Greek? they contain some
identical tags with different subtags (and I did not list all of
them). Why la-classic is not acceptable, while, say, el and
el-polyton are acceptable?<br>
<br>
Mojca shows that Wikipedia lists more than half a dozen variants
of Latin; I am not going to add so many modifiers/attributes for
all these Latin languages; I would like that real linguists took
care of their necessities with their professional competence, that
I miss. But up to now I wrote some 15 pattern files for different
languages (not all of them are or have been on CTAN); I got some
experience in creating such pattern files without using patgen
(because it assumes the existance of a very large list of
correctly hyphenated words) but just using grammar rules. Now some
difficulties arise because the language-subtag-registry file is
incomplete.<br>
<br>
Who is in charge of maintaining that file should provide the
missing entries; I am not going to submit any request for updating
that list. Is it really necessary for the good working of the TeX
system or is it just one of those constraints that are becomming
so common in modern times. I added the classiclatin language to my
personal language files; recreated the formats and everything
seems to work properly so that I succeeded testing and correcting
as much as necessary. So I wonder what this fuss abut subtags is
for.<br>
<br>
If and when a decision on tags and subtags is taken, I accordingly
</big><big><big><small>change</small> </big>the contents of the
babel-latin and</big><big><big> <small>gloss-latin</small></big>
language description files, and of course the hyph-*.tex files.<br>
<br>
Please let me know the decisions taken on this matter.<br>
<br>
Regards<br>
Claudio<br>
</big><br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 03/06/2014 19:32, Mojca Miklavec
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CALBOmsYMFDsvXjtC2uLN-eHYZ=q+iHdX2+AjL149EqqFMLNPbQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 5:55 PM, Claudio Beccari wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On 03/06/2014 13:21, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">We need something from the standard, see
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-registry">http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-registry</a>
and I don't find anything suitable on the list.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
I examined the file at the link indicated above; I could not figure out where that code is needed in the hyphenation files; I suppose it is not needed there.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
The code is not really *needed* for hyphenation, but we would like to
use a consistent naming scheme for the patterns.
In short: we can in principle pick any name, but I consider it a bad
practice to rename the files later. To TeX users it shouldn't make a
difference. If nobody is willing to deal with the standard, we don't
really have to do that at all.
The only visible difference is whether we put "classiclatin" or
something else into language.dat/language.def.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Actually the file contains an entry:
%%
Type: language
Subtag: la
Description: Latin
Added: 2005-10-16
Suppress-Script: Latn
which is good for Latin, and porbabily is associated to the existing loadhyph-la.tex file and its friends.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
Yes. That subtag "la" gives the name to "hyph-la.tex", "loadhyph-la.tex" etc.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Now classic Latin is not a different language; it uses the same alphabet and I could not invent a new entry to that: the ISO regulatins don't distinguish modern Latin from medieval latin and from classical Latin.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
Yes, I'm aware of that.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">The Wiki ISO 639 entries for Latin are:
Language Language Native name 639
family name 1 2T 2B 3 6 notes
Indo-European Latin latine, lingua latina la lat lat lat lats ancient
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
We don't need a new ISO 639 entry (and cannot register one either).
Just a subtag to specify the language variant. Similar to
"el-monoton"/"el-polyton" and "de-1901"/"de-1996".
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I know that it is necessary to name another language for a different hyphenation pattern set
the same as it is done with Greek (even if it is not actually used, or it is used in a funny way -- the (babel-)greek.ldf does not ever use the ancient greek pattern set nor the modern monotonic greek pattern set, it uses only the polytonic greek pattern set).
Polyglossia, on the opposite does not have any problem in using three greek pattern sets: apparently they refer to languages "monotonic", "polytonic", and "ancient". In the language-subtag-registry for greek I find only:
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
You need to talk to Arthur for support of a new language variant for
Latin in Polyglossia. And probably prepare something for babel.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">%%
Type: language
Subtag: el
Description: Modern Greek (1453-)
Added: 2005-10-16
Suppress-Script: Grek
%%
Type: language
Subtag: grc
Description: Ancient Greek (to 1453)
Added: 2005-10-16
%%
Type: language
Subtag: grk
Description: Greek languages
Added: 2009-07-29
Scope: collection
%%
Type: variant
Subtag: monoton
Description: Monotonic Greek
Added: 2006-12-11
Prefix: el
%%
Type: variant
Subtag: polyton
Description: Polytonic Greek
Added: 2006-12-11
Prefix: el
plus several "script" entries.
In similarity with Greek a new entry could be added as such:
%%
Type: variant
Subtag: classic
Description: Classic Latin
Added: 2014-06-03
Prefix: la
I think this is the least invasive addition to the subtag list.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
Yes, something like that would make sense. But: does one need more
than one variant? It would be weird to request, say, "la-classic" now
and "la-archaic" + "la-modern" + "la-neo" a few years later when you
realize that even different patterns are needed for those. What set of
subtags would make sense? Would you be willing to draft a proposal and
submit a request for inclusion?
See
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.langtag.net/register-new-subtag.html">http://www.langtag.net/register-new-subtag.html</a>
There is one potential problem with the above mentioned subtag though.
According to RFC 5646:
Requests to add a 'Prefix' field to a variant subtag that imply a
different semantic meaning SHOULD be rejected. For example, a
request to add the prefix "de" to the subtag '1994' so that the tag
"de-1994" represented some German dialect or orthographic form would
be rejected. The '1994' subtag represents a particular Slovenian
orthography, and the additional registration would change or blur the
semantic meaning assigned to the subtag. A separate subtag SHOULD be
proposed instead.
This means that registering "la-classic" would prohibit anyone else
from registering "<anotherlanguagetag>-classic". There is a chance
that no other language would ever need that tag anyway, but it's
something I wasn't really aware of until now.
I'm also a bit confused by what Wikipedia says:
The word "Latin" is now taken by default as meaning "Classical
Latin", so that, for example, modern Latin text books describe
classical Latin. [1]
Classicists use the term "Neo-Latin" to describe the use of the
Latin language for any purpose, scientific or literary, after the
Renaissance. [2]
[1] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Latin">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Latin</a>
[2] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Latin">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Latin</a>
So to me it's not even clear which of the both patterns should be
called "latin".
But just to make sure that I understand it properly: are two pattern
sets needed because exactly the same words would hyphenate differently
in classical and modern Latin? Or is it just that the vocabularies of
both are so different that it's very difficult or impossible to cover
both variants of the language?
(I'm asking because I would like to know if there is a trick to cover
both variants with the same set of patterns or if that's theoretically
impossible because the rules are too different.)
Thank you,
Mojca
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
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