1. the babel core (the language hyphenation pattern switching mechanism) is *not* _unfortunately_ loaded with babel: it is part of the core functionality of a multilingual LaTeX.
This code has been preloaded since the old days when a package could take a few seconds to load, and multilingual support was considered a core feature. This is not true any longer (loading time, I mean), but it's still preloaded for backwards compatibility, which means babel is loaded somehow even if you don't want it. Not a good idea, imo. Javier
