How to tag Glossary items with prefixes

Question

I need some wisdom as to how to best treat and tag glossary items when the items in question are sometimes preceded by a grammatical clitic. So, suppose my word for “baptize” is the verb abcd Sometimes this verb is preceded by clitic x, thus in our text we have abcd occurring as well as x-abcd. And there is a glossary entry for abcd.

In a printed Bible for a language group who have very low literacy, what is the best practice on the question of where to place the asterisk? On the verb root or the verb word? Should I have *x-abcd or x-*abcd in the printed text? What does wisdom suggest? Marking *x-abcd seems to provide an easier-to-read text compared with x-*abcd, but the glossary entry is actually abcd, not x-abcd. And since the grammatical clitic in question occurs on all verbs, it affects other glossary entries, so putting an entry: x-abcd. See abcd, doesn’t seem practical.

Finally, if collective wisdom suggests it would be best to mark the verb root, i.e. x-abcd, is there a way to get the Key Terms Tool to correctly mark my text as such using the “Mark Occurrences of selected terms as Glossary item”? At the present time, I have as a rendering *abcd so that it finds/accepts x-abcd as a valid rendering for that term, but if I choose “Mark Occurrences…”, my text is marked \w x-abcd|abcd \w which produces *x-abcd in a printed text.

anon863078

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Answer 1

anon863078, this is really an orthography question (I mean orthography in the broad sense of facilitating reading and writing, not in the narrow sense of “assigning phonemes to letters”), so you might want to talk with an orthography consultant about this. Based on my experience (both as a former orthography consultant and as someone who has worked with semi-literate people), my first question is, Will they really use the glossary? Before you put a lot of effort into making something wonderful, make sure it will really be worth the effort. Glossaries are not the only way to teach the meanings of terms, and something that’s more interactive might work a lot better. Secondly, my gut feeling is that if you are actually using a hyphen in the orthography to separate the clitic from the verb, then it might be best to put the asterisk after the hyphen, otherwise it looks like the asterisk is marking the clitic. However, as with all orthography issues, what seems best to outsiders isn’t necessarily what seems best to the speakers of the language. Our gut feeling is merely a hypothesis to be tested. You have to devise a way to test the effectiveness and acceptability of various options, and then use whatever works for them. (For example, they might not like to see the text peppered with asterisks.)

Hope this helps.
RickNivens

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Comments

Thanks for your thoughts RickNivens on my orthographic question. All very good points for reflection, and I agree with your gut reaction to mark the verb ROOT. As you say, testing and discussion with the community is needed. If the community chooses to mark the verb ROOT, i.e. x-*abcd, how does one get PT to mark the text in this way? At the present time, PT only seems to be able to mark the verb WORD.

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anon863078:

…how does one get PT to mark the text in this way? At the present time, PT only seems to be able to mark the verb WORD.

Not understanding much about the implications for the language, I can say that it’s probably best to have Paratext mark the word as \w x-abcd|abcd\w* and change it to x-*abcd at publishing time. Having a marker split a word in the text will not work well for the Paratext checks, etc.

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Thanks. That’s helpful advice.

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