word-forming periods (!)

[Josh Jensen]

In the Osage practical orthography, syllables are separated by periods (and, perhaps quite sensibly, there is no MODIFIER LETTER FULL STOP in Unicode). So for the practical Osage writing system in FLEx, I've put the FULL STOP in the word-forming characters table.

However, when I interlineraize, FLEx is getting confused. In the Gloss tab, Word-base line, it gives the word up to the first period (see image 2). In the Word-Osa line, it gives the entire word (image 2). Once I click on the word and make it active, the Word-Osa line drops everything after the first period. (When I created the baseline, I did in fact select the correct writing system for the text.)

Any thoughts?

(Yes, I know the correct answer is to take out the periods or substitute something for them, but I don't have any say in how the Osage language department chooses to represent their language.)

Josh Jensen

UT Arlington

[John Thomson]

This is probably something to do with the fact that period is considered (by default) not only to be non-word-forming, but also to be an end-of-sentence marker.

 

I don't remember whether we have yet made the end-of-sentence characters configurable, but you might look for that…I doubt it is possible to get the behavior you want without convincing FLEx NOT to treat period as end-of-sentence.

 

JohnT

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[Jeff and Peg Shrum]

To fully understand all of this I would need to see more data, but aren’t periods used in IPA to mark syllable boundaries?  Why hasn’t this problem surfaced before in projects where IPA is used as the orthography?  And isn’t punctuation fully configurable in the writing system?

 

Jeff S.

Language Technology Consultant

SIL Mozambique

[Josh Jensen]

The "Valid Characters" dialog lets you assign characters to particular classes: Word Forming, Punctuation/Symbols/Spaces, and Numbers. But there's no way (here) to say "never treat this character as punctuation," at least as far as I can see. My current settings are as you see in the attached file.

Josh

[Craig Farrow]

Josh,

Here are three unicode characters that I found worked by defining them
as Word Forming, and then using them in a text. Possible strategies in
order of preference:
- See if you can convince the language department that using a period
will create difficulties using their orthography with software (I
imagine that FLEx won't be the only software that doesn't handle this
well...) and use a middle dot instead.
- Use a middle dot in your database, and then do a search-and-replace
in your output any time you want to publish.
- Use the "one dot leader" in your database, which should look right
when you print; However, I don't really recommend this as it will create
confusion since it's appearance is the same as Full Stop (U+002E), and
you won't be able to tell visually if you've entered the right
code-point in your database.

- 'MIDDLE DOT' (U+00B7)
- 'BULLET' (U+2022)
- 'ONE DOT LEADER' (U+2024)

Craig.

6/05/2012 1:13 a.m. dï, Josh Jensen pišdimiš:

[Arjan]

I'm working with a text that has abbreviations containing a dot at the end. It seems only the 'one dot leader' solution you mentioned could work in that case. Is that the best option? Are there other alternatives (other than not using abbreviations - these are part of the original document)?

Arjan

Op dinsdag 8 mei 2012 08:57:08 UTC+2 schreef Craig het volgende:

[Josh Jensen]

Thanks, Craig.

I agree that the ONE DOT LEADER would be nice if it were visually distinguishable...

Probably I'll just have to present this issue as a problem and see what the community wants to do (if anything).

Josh

> flex-list+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com

[Craig Farrow]

Arjan,

Josh's problem was that the wordform was split at the period when
interlinearising; for your case of having a dot at the end it doesn't
matter (unless you have abbreviations with word-medial dots such as
'e.g.') I just tried it in Flex and the period is still included in the
wordform, so when you create a lexical entry the period is there, too.

Craig.

8/05/2012 8:38 p.m. dï, Arjan pišdimiš: