1*NOTES ABOUT NORWEGIAN* 2 3The Norwegian language has two written forms, called bokmål and nynorsk, whose 4history dates back to the 19th century during the Danish occupation. The most 5widely used one of them is bokmål, but nynorsk is used as well, and they are 6both official languages of Norway. The ISO 639-1 code are ‘nb’ for bokmål and 7‘nn’ for nynorsk. There is also a ISO 639-1 code for “Norwegian”, ‘no’. 8 9 Traditionally, LaTeX has been supporting Norwegian under the common name 10“norsk”, with “norwegian” as an alias in language.dat. The captions in Babel's 11norsk.ldf are in bokmål. Since a few months, there are two additional pattern 12files available on CTAN labelled as bokmål and nynorsk, which correct 13hyphenations for a small number of words – two words for each language, 14actually: in bokmål, attende and betre are hyphenated at-ten-de and be-tre, 15whereas in nynorsk it's att-en-de and bet-re. With the current patterns for 16“Norwegian” (nohyphbx.tex), though, they are hyphenated atten-de and betre, 17which is correct in neither language. The new pattern files provide therefore 18provide tiny improvements. 19 20 Since the Babel's current support is suitable for bokmål, and the bokmål 21patterns are only slightly different from the current ones, we can use them as 22the successor to the norsk patterns, and ship the nynorsk patterns in addition 23to this. We thus can use the following definitions in language.no.dat: 24 25 norsk loadhyph-nb.tex 26 =norwegian 27 =bokmal 28 nynorsk loadhyph-nn.tex 29 30 Of course, the nynorsk patterns still can't be used directly as long as there 31is no Babel support, but we hope that support will be added on the future, and 32the patterns will already be there. 33 34 Arthur, 2008-06-11 35