[XeTeX] Question about polyglossia and babel

[Alexander]

2010/5/31, Vadim Radionov <vadim.radionov at gmail.com>:
> Vladimir,
>
> You know, that Russian babel short-hands do slightly more than just insert a
> glyph from the font: they adjust the spacing around the em-dash (and the
> length of the dash, too), and allow hyphenation of adjacent words (in case
> of hyphens).  So even in the case of Unicode input we need some macros to do
> this job.

Yes, this is the main reason. And they're easier to enter from the keyboard.