Basque: A Case Study in Generalizing LaTeX Language Support

Abstract

The multilingual support of LaTeX presents many weak points, especially when a language does not present the same overall syntactic scheme as English. Basque is one of the official languages in the Basque Country, being spoken by almost 650,000 speakers (it is also spoken in Navarre and the south of France). The origins of the Basque language are unknown. It is not related to any neighboring language, nor to other Indo-European languages (such as Latin or German). Thus, dates, references and numbering do not follow the typical English pattern. For example, the numbering of figure prefixes does not correspond to the \figurename\thefigure structure, but is exactly the other way round. To make matters worse, the presence of declension can turn this usually simple task into a nightmare. This article proposes an alternative structure for the basic classes, in order to support multilingual documents in a natural way, even in those cases where the languages do not follow the typical English-like overall structure.