What’s new in babel 3.77

2022-06-26

More on calendars: \localedate and \today.

There are two new calendars: coptic (for arabic-egypt and coptic) and buddhist (for thai),

Based on the CLDR and the ICU, now ini files contain some information on calendars. It’s used to set the default calendar in a few locales.

\localedate now accepts a valueless key named convert, which is basically syntactical sugar, because all it does is to convert arguments with the year, month and day in the gregorian calendar to the calendar set with calendar=. For example:

\localedate[calendar=islamic-civil, convert]{\year}{\month}{\day}

This will print the date in the Islamic Civil calendar using the format for the islamic date in the ini file, as loaded by \babelprovide. Without convert, the arguments must be the date already in the target calendar (which can be useful, for example, when the data has been generated externally in a editing environment where LaTeX is just a component).

A new option calendar in \babelprovide sets the defaults to be used in \localedate, which turn is used by \today. So, if you want to apply the settings in the previous example to all dates, you may write something like:

\babelprovide[import, calendar=islamic-civil]{arabic}

(Of course, different territory locales can be assigned different default calendars.) The arguments in \localedate are still those corresponding to the calendar, but you can set convert in the optional argument.

A special notation is used to enter the date variant in \babelprovide. For example:

\babelprovide[import, calendar=gregorian.izafa]{northernkurdish}

If the calendar is gregorian, you may omit it. A variant in this case is just preceded by a dot:

\babelprovide[import, calendar=.izafa]{northernkurdish}

Calendars in the CLDR are, actually, territory based (which is somewhat questionable in certain cases). So the settings are those for the region in territory locales (ie, with a region in the BCP 47 tag) or the ‘likely’ tag in language locales (without a region).

Note the preferred calendar in the CLDR for the Arabic locales currently provided by babel is gregorian, except ar-SA (Saudi Arabia), which is new in version 3.77.

⚠ Locales for IR (Iran) and AF (Afghanistan) now will print the date with the Persian calendar by default: Persian, Northern Luri, Mazanderani, Pashto.

Locales

• As explained above, a new locale for Arabic has been added, namely, arabic-saudiarabia (or arabic-sa). By default its calendar is Umm al-Qura.
• bangla is now the preferred name for bengali (both language and script).
• More minor updates to the CLDR 41: Afrikaans, Arabic, Assamese, Asturian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bangla, Tibetan, Breton, Bodo, Bosnian, Catalan, English.

See the following section for some changes in the German locales.

German and ini files

Currently the German babel styles in its ldf form have names which aren’t compatible with those standardized in the Unicode CLDR: on the one hand, the CLDR assigns the name ‘Swiss German’ to a different language (BCP 47 gsw), and on the other, the ldf variant for german isn’t even the option to be used for German (except if you want the pre-1996 orthography). A somewhat hackish fix han been devised to load the correct ini files (which contain relevant data to identify internally the locales), based on the hyphenation patterns assigned to the those names (as well as to austrian).

⚠ With this fix, and when loaded with \babelprovide or on the fly, swissgerman refers to gsw, not to the Standard German as spoken in Switzerland. Now de-CH, following the CLDR, has the alternative name swisshighgerman (besides german-switzerland and german-ch).

Fixes

The format for the Thai calendar was incorrect. It was essentially a hack, and now the new features for calendars are used instead.