[tex-live] Serious (?) problem with Babel and language attributes

[Robin Fairbairns]

Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:

> I got a bug report here at Debian, but it is the same in the
> current TL2014 status. It seems that something with the
> language attributes is up-side-down:
> 
> The report states that
> 	\today
> prints the wrong month for June in Russian. It should be
> 	"июнь" (cyrillic "i" at the first position)
> but comes out as
> 	"iюнь" (latin "i" followed by cyrillic "юнь")
> 
> The input file is trivial:
> \documentclass[12pt,russian]{article}
> \usepackage[T2A]{fontenc}
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
> \usepackage{babel}
> \begin{document}
> \today
> \end{document}
> 
> (with or without the inputenc, I tried both!)
> 
> 
> Reading a bit through russian.ldf I see that the printed version
> is related to the "ancient" variant of Russian.
> 
> So I tried
> ...
> \usepackage{babel}
> \languageattribute{russian}{ancient}
> ...
> 
> and voila, the June comes out as expected in all cyrillic.
> 
> So it seems to me that there is something - a test - turned
> around.
> 
> I am not sure whether Karl considers this a show-stopper, but
> considering how core babel is that would be a good reason for me.

the package has a "modern"/"ancient" switch; there was a language reform
after the revolution (iirc).

if the switch is set to "ancient", it sets june and july with an "old"
cyrillic "i", but if the switch is set to modern, it uses the soft "i"
(transcribed, iirc, as "yi").  the document that's had trouble
presumably has the command

  \languageattribute{russian}{ancient}

in it.

robin

> Please try to keep the Debian bug report in Cc, if possible.