On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 06:06:49PM +0200, Pablo Rodriguez wrote:
> On 05/16/2016 03:14 PM, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
> > > But does ConTeXt have \la different from \ala because of the Holy See?
> >
> > See my reply to your earlier email.
>
> I agree with you that classical or ancient vs. modern are misleading
> adjectives when referred to Latin.
>
> In my opinion, etymological or phonetic vs. syllabic should be preferred.
There are two layers, actually (at least in LaTeX; not sure how much
of this is reproduced in ConTeXt): 1. Spelling conventions, 2. Hyphenation.
For the latter, a classification by historical periods clearly makes no
sense, but there is some truth to the fact that an orthography with no
u/v or i/j distinction is closer to the way Latin was written in
classical times (if only very slightly); while using both u and v, and
especially i and j, in contrastive distributions, clearly are modern
conventions -- it would be nice to have a vocabulary for that that
doesn't rely on periods of the evolution of Latin, since those cover
much more than simple differences in spelling. The LaTeX packages
(Babel and Polyglossia) currently have four options, actually:
classical, medieval, modern, and liturgical, such that "classical" will
for example yield "Nouembris" (and all the other ones "Novembris");
"medieval" uses æ and œ and will thus have "Præfatio", etc.
Best,
Arthur