Reduplication in the Worldlist

Question

I’m working with a language where words with prefixes and suffixes can be reduplicated to show plurality. A “-” is used to mark reduplication in the orthography.

The Wordlist doesn’t seem to handle morphology when a pre and suffixed form is reduplicated. It thinks the whole form is the stem and complains if I try to add a prefix after a suffix. (I know it can handle it in the Biblical Key Terms list using a &, but that doesn’t work in the Wordlist.)

Wordlist could have the following items (the slash is just for readability here, it’s not present in the orthography):

1. prefix/stem/suffix
2. prefix/stem/suffix-prefix/stem/suffix

When entering morphology in the Wordlist there are no problems for the first word (prefix+ stem +suffix).

The second word should be prefix+ stem + suffix prefix+ stem +suffix, but Paratext does not allow a prefix after a suffix.

Any idea how to handle this or is it something beyond Paratext’s current capabilities?

Answer 1

Have you looked at infixes for the wordlist?

This would be a hack, where you would need to “also tagg certain suffixes and certain prefixes as infixes”. So those morphemes would exist twice in your system, once as a “regular” suffix and once as an “exotic” infix.

We feel the limits of PT in other areas, and we accept that certain special “beauties” in our language require some hacks or some extra work.

I tried your example and it works, it just wants no spaces for infixes. Like this:

prefix+ stem+suffix++prefix+stem +suffix

I am not claiming that is your solution, but it might inspire you to keep trying and hopefully you find something that fits your language.