Languages that mark syllable boundary with space: How do we handle this

Question

We have a language family in our area that has historically used the same space (0020) to mark syllable boundary as well as word boundary.

Among other things this renders the Word List feature essentially useless as your list is essentially a list of syllables.

Has anyone dealt with this before? We know that we can signify a word boundary marker, can we signify a syllable boundary marker? Ideally, the syllable boundary marker would be replaced with space in the Preview View.

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Answer 1

I would suggest using a non-breaking space (entered in as a tilde (~) inside Paratext) for your syllable boundaries. It’s already automatically replaced with a no-break space in the Preview View and would keep words from getting split by word-wrapping logic.

EDIT: Unfortunately, that doesn’t solve the Wordlist problem, though.

EDIT2: I tried adding the ‘~’ as word-medial punctuation in the language settings and, even though it showed a warning message about it, it seemed to make the Wordlist work correctly.

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Comments

Thank you anon291708.

MSEAIT/LT

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The trouble is, if you add ‘~’ as word-medial punctuation, it breaks non-breaking-space functionality. That is, the ‘~’ will no longer show up as a space in Preview mode - it will show up as a tilde. Perhaps this isn’t a major problem, since at publication, tildes can be converted to spaces of whatever sort outside of Paratext.

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Answer 2

That is not what I see in Paratext 9. They look like spaces in Preview mode. The only problem is that they behave like no-break spaces too. But like you say they can be changed to regular spaces in typesetting, or when putting it on the DBL.
When submitting the project to the DBL, make sure to include the following line in DBLchanges.txt:
'~' > ' '

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