I am sorry to say that you have a minimalista vision of the two
languages; Actually Latina variants are theree: modern (or neolatin),
medieval and classic.
Modern and medieval are manages by ONE hyphenationa pattern set that
takes care of the differences in u/v, and this seems to be your view of
the situation, where from the very beginning the two varaint spellings
were treated with ONE pattern file. Their common approach for
hyphenations, besides the different spelling u/v is a phonetic approach,
that apparently was also adopted by the Vatican Typography after the
second Vatincan Council in the sixtiees.
Classic Latin has the same dicotomy u/v as medieval spelling, but the
hyphenation is essentially etymological; why then classic latin should
have twice as mani patterns compared with medieval latin? It is not the
questiono of u/v that is already dealt with by hyph-la.tex for both
neolatin and medieval latin. It is due to the plethora of prefixes that
cause the break points to shift in different positions. Not only: it is
not sufficient to identify the start of a word, becaise for example the
initial string "re" nay be a prefix or may belong to the root of the
word; hyphenatin in these instances are different.
I am sorry to be severe in these statements, but I have perfectly
understood the problem. Mojca commented very wella bout the opportunity
of not worrying about classical Latin in OFFO, because presumably there
are non OFFO compliant web sites were classical latin is dealt with.
If you really want to implement classicla hyphenation in OFFO, you
should use a different language name, for example va_VA, connecting the
language name to the only state where the "Vatican" latin dialect is
used with classical spelling AND hyphenation.
Claudio
On 11/03/2016 10:25, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 12:54:41AM +0100, Claudio Beccari wrote:
No, hyphenation patterns for Modern Latin are phonetic while for classic
Latin are etymological.
That's exactly what I said: these are two different hyphenation
strategies, the differences between the languages you call "Modern
Latin" and "Classical Latin" are actually minimal since they're mostly
about the u/v convention; I wouldn't even call that a different
language, it's just a different spelling.
We support these two options in TeX, by considering them two different
language variants, but that doesn't reflect the situation very well.
Therefore, for external projects that can't support these types of
languages variants, it seems best to pick one of the two files and drop
the other; since the phonetic one (the one we tag "la") has been around
for a much longer time, it's probably that one they should choose.
I'd have hard time to say that a pattern set of approximately 335 patterns
(modern/medieval Latin) is practically the same as another set of
apporximately 655 patterns (classic latin).
You're not trying to understand what I said. The hyphenation is very
different, the languages are essentially the same.
Best,
Arthur
