Problem with plain tex and babel

Hi,

I just upgrade my system to Mandriva 2005LE which ships tetex 3.0.

As I am used to, I ran texconfig to set up my system. In addition to 
default modes for printing, I usually add babel to plain tex with 4 
languages: english, french, german and italian.

In particular, when editing the formats file, I changed (as suggested)

tex  tex   language.dat    -translate-file=cp227.tcx bplain.ini

and in the hyphenation file for tex the only not commented lines are:

--------------------------

american ushyph1.tex
=USenglish

british.
=english

french          frhyph.tex
=patois

german          dehypht.tex
=austrian

italian ithyph.tex

nohyphenation zerohyph.tex

---------------------------

Usually, after having done this, everything worked fine. This time, I 
can't get any trace of babel in tex:

-----
[10:01:48 ~]$ tex
This is TeX, Version 3.141592 (Web2C 7.5.4)
**\bye
No pages of output.
Transcript written on texput.log.
------------

I also made some test with my tex files.

Nevertheless, when I changed the format, the log displayed
---
14 hyphenation exceptions
Hyphenation trie of length 16225 has 511 ops out of 35111
   35 for language 3
   207 for language 2
   88 for language 1
   181 for language 0
No pages of output.
Transcript written on tex.log.
fmtutil: /root/.texmf-var/web2c/tex.fmt installed.
---

So it seems that my languages have been loaded correctly.

Can anybody please help me?

Best regards

Fabio Stumbo