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

[Manfred Lotz]

On Sun, 1 Jun 2014 10:28:34 +0100
Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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.
> 

If set to ancient then it is іюня, otherwise (the modern variation) it
is июня.  As Zdeněk pointed out rightly, the я indicates genitive. 

Interesting question is why Norbert got the nominative form июнь.

According to russianb.pdf the default should be modern cyrillic which
is actually not true.

As texmf-dist/tex/generic/babel-russian/russianb.ldf is the same in
both texlive 2013 and 2014 the error doesn't seem to be texlive 2014
specific.



-- 
Manfred