[tex-live] tlmgr query

[Philipp Stephani]

Zdenek Wagner schrieb:
> Babel is not hardwired into LaTeX, it's just a package with a lot of 
> files. If you do not put \usepackage[languages]{babel} into your 
> document, it will not be loaded.

No. Babel (more specifically, Babel's hyphen.cfg) is loaded into the
LaTeX format in TeX Live, because hyphenation patterns must be built
into the format. If you examine the output of any LaTeX run, you'll
notice a banner like

LaTeX2e <2005/12/01>
Babel <v3.8l> and hyphenation patterns for ... loaded.

And most Babel commands like \languagename and \selectlanguage are
available without \usepackage{babel} (though you still need the latter
to get language selection actually working).

If you want to get rid of Babel, you have to build a custom format with
a private hyphen.cfg.