hyphens as part of orthography

[Becky Paterson]

Hello all,
I am hoping to make use of some texts created for beginner reading
materials. However, these texts were created in an orthography that uses
hyphens to set off certain prefixes. I have managed to set up the
necessary alternate vernacular writing system, but I'm not sure how to
best deal with the hyphens that are part of the orthography.

Is there a way to tell FLEx to ignore the hyphens? I have attempted to
make the hyphen a punctuation character in the writing
system-characters-valid characters. It doesn't seem to make a difference.

Any ideas about keeping the current orthographic representation and
having FLEx texts ignore the hyphen?

Thanks,
Becky

[Kent Rasmussen]

I think the difference you're looking for is between word forming characters and non-wordforming characters. And you may not have the flexibility you want on this; I recently tried to set a writing system with a nonbreaking space as a wordforming character (since that's how I use it in this context), but FLEx insisted it be a non-wordforming character, as I assume it usually is.
You might be better of creating another field in another hyphen-free system, and bulk copy into it, then remove the hyphens with bulk edit. Then you'd have two corresponding writing systems, one with and the other without the hyphens.

--
Kent Rasmussen
SIL Eastern Congo Group Linguistics Consultant / Conseiller en Linguistique de SIL au Congo de l'Est
Orthographies for eastern DRC / Orthographes pour la RDC de l'est
+1-541-357-7276

[Beth-docs Bryson]

If you set hyphen to be a word-forming character, be sure to go to:

Lists/Morpheme Types

and edit the "Leading Token" and "Trailing Token" of any morpheme type that uses a hyphen to indicate the morpheme type, such as prefix or suffix.

That is, you cannot both have it as a word-forming character, and also as the signal that something is an affix.  It can be one or the other.

Beth

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[David Robertson]

Hi all, I too am hoping for an easy way to tell FLEx to ignore certain symbols that I'm using. (I'm more linguist than techy.) Is there any update on this? 

Best from 

Dave

[Jonathan Dailey]

Move the hyphen into the "word forming" from punctuation.

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[David Robertson]

Thanks for your reply, Jonathan. If I'm using other symbols that I want to exude, e.g. bracket or radical symbol, does the same procedure work?

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[Jonathan Dailey]

I imagine so.  I have not tried brackets.  Are they used to form words? I think Flex will ignore them if they are just used at the sentence level.

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[Bob Eaton]

Another suggestion is to have two kinds of hyphens. The normal hyphen for punctuation (as normal), and another one (e.g. soft hyphen -- http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/ad/index.htm) as the word-forming character for when you want it to be part of a word.

I have a snippet of InKey syntax (for an InKey keyboard) to insert the latter when you press the hyphen key twice, if you need.

Bob

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[Becky Paterson]

The two hyphen solution is a reasonable one from a technical point of view. I doubt it will fly when you undergo usability testing by typists.  When will they use the second hyphen.  This might be mitigated with some smart spellchecking software. 

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