german is a mess!

[Reissner]

Besides unsystematic (older?) names for languages like american, british,
the English (en) language variants in various countries
can be systematically reached by english-US, english-uk and all the other country codes relevant for English as well.
Besides that, there is a long form like english-unitedstates.

In French, likewise with the deficiency, that there is no French for France.
I feel this is some inconsistency if you think of \DocumentMetadata{lang=fr} which is some french,
but not the French used in France.

In German, things could be as easy as that, almost.
For example German in Austria is called german-at or german-austria.
There is only one additional problem, because there is a traditional variant and a contemporary one,
like in chinese, where there is also chinese-traditional.
Likewise, there is german-austria-traditional.
So far so good.

For the German used in Germany, there is no german-germany which would be the contemporary.
There is only german which is in ldf traditional, whereas in ini it is contemporary.
ngerman which stands for new german is always ldf and contemporary, but this breaks the convention.
And why should I call a contemporary variant valid since 1996 new???
In fact, german-traditional is always ini and german in germany before 1996.
To make sure that I hit the right thing i must use ngerman which is ldf which is close to end of life,
combined with german-traditional which is ini.
Strange.
One could recover just using the system for austria also for germany:
german-germany or german-de for contemporary and german-germany-traditional for the old variant.
The idea is to resolve the mess with ngerman by removing the other deficiency,
that germany is not represented by country code.

In short, I would like to use german-de, german-at and german-ch for the contemporary,
I do not want to use ngerman for the German of Germany which is the majority.
Maybe I would go on using german-traditional for the traditional German of Germany.

[Reissner]

One could well do without naustrian and nswissgerman.
The latter is the contemporary.
Are you aware that austrian is traditional whereas swissgerman is not even german.
It is a dialect rather than a language.
The language is swisshighgerman which is as contemporary as nswissgerman.

You may understand why i want to get rid of that n.
The germans the nation of thinkers and poets... famously disciplined and organized. Even more the swiss...

A last suggestion: i know that Liechtenstein use swiss system, but german-li would be consequent.
Likewise Luxembourg use FRG system but still german-lu would be fine.

[jbezos]

@Reissner Yes, it’s a mess. I’m aware of the problem (see #347 (comment)). Please, contact the current maintainer of the ldf style for German (@jspitz).

WRT to the naming conventions, see Locale naming.

Are you aware that austrian is traditional whereas swissgerman is not even german

Yes, I’m aware. See https://latex3.github.io/babel/guides/locale-german.html.

I’ll add the suggested locales, which even are in the Unicode CLDR. There are in fact two further regions, namely Italy and Belgium.

[jspitz]

FWIW I agree that the naming is unfortunate, and I am open to introduce new, better names for the varieties, as long as we keep the semantics of the old names for backwards compatibility. So german has to remain german-1901, unfortunately, and we also need to keep ngerman and friends in order to not change the output of existing documents.

Proposals welcome!

[jspitz]

@jbezos would you go with @Reissner's suggestions, that is:

• german-de
• german-at
• german-ch
• german-li
• german-be (???)
• german-de-1901
• german-at-1901
• german-ch-1901
• german-li-1901
• german-be-1901 (???)

[u-fischer]

So german has to remain german-1901,

@jspitz sorry but I do not think that this will do. german has to be current german. You can not explain to new users that you do not get the official german if you use german.

[jspitz]

@u-fischer this is not possible as I don't want to break old documents (and software that relies on the recieved terminology, such as LyX).

[jspitz]

and BTW, there are (at least) three "official" Germans, since German is a pluricentric language.

[jbezos]

@jspitz

we also need to keep ngerman and friends in order to not change the output of existing documents.

I'm afraid that's not really the case, because the German hyphenation patterns have evolved over the years. In fact, there was a major revision recently. I don’t understand why the patterns for German can be updated, but the babel german style has to be stuck on the 1901 variant.

• german-de
• german-at
• german-ch

The point here is german must be German. Adding even more names will only increase the mess.

[jbezos]

@jspitz

As to LyX and other programs, we can open a transitional period, so that actions can be taken for they to be adapted to the correct names, with an announcement.

[jspitz]

OK, so I am afraid we won't have a deal.

[FrankMittelbach]

OK, so I am afraid we won't have a deal.

meaning what Jürgen? That you intend to resign from maintaining the babel files for German?

[FrankMittelbach]

@u-fischer this is not possible as I don't want to break old documents (and software that relies on the recieved terminology, such as LyX).

@jspitz just to avoid any missunderstandings: all of us are very much concerned about long-time compatibility and reprocessability of documents -- LaTeX wouldn't be be alive and strong after the 3+ decades I'm in that business if this wasn't and isn't part of the general guiding principles. But that doesn't mean that each and every document need to be producing 100% identical results without certain compatibility settings if going forward with bad interfaces is producing more and more problems.

To the problem at hand: only oldtimers like me (and probably you) still know that they have to say "ngerman" not "german" when they want German text that isn't decades out of being correct. Most new users in the days of not reading documentation automatically assume that "german" is what you need to say to switch to the German language and for people not native German speakers that is probably 100% true as this is the way all other languages work.

• reprocessing old documents that really want to use old rules would at most require to specify a suitable name, e.g., german-de-1901 which is not zero-touch, but on the other hand is is not that much of a hardship
• it should also be possible to set things up that using \RequirePackage[<date>]{latexrelease} is possible
• certainly such a change would get suitable coverage in LaTeX News
• concerning software like LyX: there should be no problem to get this sorted out on the program side with a suitable grace period
• it should also be possible for a limited time it put out a warning with "german" that this refers to current German and what to use if somebody really wants "old German rules"
• similarly "ngerman" could stay around with a note that this is deprecated and "german" or "german-..." is preferable

Midterm this will give everybody a much much cleaner and understandable interface because the current one is frankly not understandable to most.

[Reissner]

If i think carefully, german-de for contemporary German of the FRG would already help a lot.