[tex-hyphen] New language classiclatin – question about the language code

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi everyone,

I have just received a request to add new patterns to hyph-utf8.

So I have a new challenge for Arthur (or anyone else who wants to add
something): what language code should we use? Should a new language
tag be requested to distinguish between modern and classic Latin? Is
there maybe a way that a single set of patterns could satisfy both (or
would the same word be hyphenated differently in classical and
"modern(?)" Latin)?

Wikipedia lists the following variants:

Archaic Latin
Classical Latin
Vulgar Latin
Medieval Latin
Renaissance Latin
Early modern Latin
Modern Latin

so in case of asking for new tags I'm not even sure which ones should
be requested.

(We didn't even learn how to hyphenate at our Latin lessons, let alone
any differences between different "versions/variants" of Latin, so I
cannot comment on anything ;)

Mojca


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Claudio Beccari
Date: Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 6:06 PM

Hi Mojca. Here are the three fundamental file for hyphenation of
classical Latin; unfortunately this language hyphenation is different
from the modern one so that a different language should be defined.

For what concerns the language.dat and language.def files the former
should just contain

% Classic Latin
classiclatin loadhyph-lac.tex

while the second one should contain:

\addlanguage{classiclatin}{loadhyph-lac}{2}{2}

Of course both file should be augmented with these new lines, because
they do not substitute the lines relative to modern or medieval Latin.

For what concerns babel, I am separately loading a babel-latin
compressed file that contains the definitions of suitable modifiers so
as to handle both hyphenations sets (of course one at the time, not
both at the same time).

I have been requested this new language pattern set, because the
classicits were unhappy with the modern hyphenation that is being used
for the past fifteen or so years; This is good and bad news at the
same time: good news because this implies that classicists are
starting to use the TeX system more widely; bad news because they
don't read the documentation and it took fifteen years or so to inform
me that the patterns were not suited for classical orthography and at
the same time nobody put their hands on the open source files that I
wrote many years ago in order to create suitable patterns. As you
might remember, I am an engineer, not a latinist nor a classicist,
therefore I am most unsuited to work with the classicists without
their support; it's years I am yelling around that TeX matters related
to humanist disciplines should be dealt by the humanists themselves,
but, apparently, the humanists don't hear my yells.

Please, let me know if I have to correct something.

I thank you very much for you assistance. With my friendly wishes.

Claudio