[tex-eplain] hyphenation patterns in plain TeX

[Karl Berry]

    I experimented a great deal with combinations of
    \usepackage{babel} (inside \beginpackages), 

Thanks very much for doing all that work.

    have any objection to going via etex.src and language.def instead 
    of bplain.tex and language.dat.

The actual hyphenation patterns and left/righthyphenmin can be (more)
easily handled outside Babel, it seems to me.  I already have it in
Texinfo and it is just a matter of copying the code into Eplain.

Babel would still be interesting if the other settings it makes were
useful for Eplain, e.g., "Chap\^itre" vs. "Chapter".  I'm not sure if
anything else it does is really relevant to (e)plain users, but I guess
it could be in theory.  I'm also not sure if those multilingual "name"
macros are even accessible through bplain.

Did you run across anything like that in your experiments?

Thanks,
Karl