Quotations check

Question

Is there a way to teach Paratext that a quotation between letters, i.e. not following or preceding a space, word-medial, are not quotations proper but apostrophes?

In our project this type of apostrophe occurs often:

Allah’ın

When I run Paratext checks it thinks I have opened a quotation but forgot to close it because our quotation rules use this same character for second-level quotations, like the following:

God said to Jeremiah, "Go tell the Israelites, thus says the Lord, ‘…’ "

The translation team really wants the same character for both of these usages but since the apostrophe way is always word-medial, I assume Paratext can learn it as a non-quotation mark, right?

Answer 1

It is not currently possible for Paratext to make this distinction. One way to handle this is to change the character that is word medial to a unicode 02BC which looks very similar to the single close quotation mark.

02BC ʼ This is a “modifier letter apostrophe”

2019 ’ This is a “Right Single Quotation Mark”

Comments

Thanks so much anon848905. I will bring up this possibility with the team.

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I’m going to hijack this tread because I’m looking for a solution similar to the one anon848905 just gave.

I’d using the Interlinearizer tool and the source text has words with ( ) marks in the middle of the word indicating text missing in the original. We want to gloss the word as a whole, but PT sees the ( ) marks as punctuation and thus want to gloss each section of the word separately.

Does anyone know of any Unicode characters that look like ( ) but aren’t punctuation (ideally which are classified as letters)?

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He(lp) me under(sta)nd what you mean.

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Here’s the source text:

Here’s what the interlinearizer looks like:

Sothe Interlinearizer expect 3 different glosses, not 1.

I’d like the word to still visually look like it has parentheses in it, but for the character in the middle of the word to not act like punctuation.

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fileformat.info

ORNATE LEFT PARENTHESIS (U+FD3E)

Get the complete details on Unicode character U+FD3E on FileFormat.Info

But it probably won’t be in our fonts

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That’s still considered punctuation (look at the “Category” in the link you sent).

I checked and it doesn’t solve the problem in PT.

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What about something like this: ꜒… ˩.

This is the Modifier Letter Extra-High Tone Bar (U+A712)
And the Modifier Letter Extra-Low Tone Bar (U+02E9)

This did not work for me until I added the characters to my Alphabetic Character list in the Language Settings.

Note - If I add the (/) to my alphabetic characters it also allows me to link. This of course will cause those characters to show up in the wordlist! So, you have to choose what is the least painful. Being able to link the words in the Interlinearizer or have a word show up with (…) or ꜒… ˩ in the Wordlist.
You could do all your work in the Interlinearizer and then remove the characters from the Alphabetic Characters before looking at the wordlist.

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Would it work to add the ( and ) characters to the medial
punctuation list?

anon806807

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@anon848905’s suggestion worked, but I was worried that it would cause more questions from the team than it solved.

I initially thought @anon806807’s suggestion wouldn’t work because it would break parentheses in other places, but then I did a search of the text and realized that parentheses only occurred word medially. So it ended up working great.