> I'd consider a library to handle i18n in javascript to be extraneous, thus the comment.
It may be extraneous, but it has nothing to do with the size of jQuery core: it's a plugin, not part of the actual library. jQuery has a plugin system that lets people add features to extend its functionality.
Actually, most of the posts that mention jQuery are really plugins, not features of jQuery itself.
The list of things actually included in the latest release is in the API docs. It's actually not a very long list of functions; I expect most of the code bloat is for dealing with browser quirks.