[tex-hyphen] hyphenation group

[Steve Peter]

>> My thoughts would be to provide a generic command along the lines of
>>
>> \hyphenation[nl, 2004-09-01]
>>
>> that would load the Dutch hyphenation patterns as of September 1, 
>> 2004. There should of course be sensible defaults. Dialects could be 
>> handled via extension to the language code (as is done elsewhere), 
>> and changes in orthography could be handled via the date.
>
> but how is for instance frysian to be tagged? (not fr i guess)
> Hans

We have two basic choices: we can use the ISO 639 codes, in which case 
Frisian would be fy or fry, or we could use the Ethnologue codes, where 
it would be FRI, FRR, or FRS, depending on the dialect of Frisian (yes, 
Frisian has dialects!).

As a linguist, I would be inclined to go with the Ethnologue codes (see 
http://www.ethnologue.com/language_code_index.asp for a discussion), 
since they permit a much finer grained distinction of languages and 
dialects, although I doubt that would impact hyphenation patterns that 
much, and might cause more work for us.

Steve