Punctuation used as tone marks

Question

Both P8 and P9 allow Word-medial punctuation, but they work differently. I have a project where we sometimes use hyphens inside a word like Tubal-cain. In, say, ESV, no Word-medial punctuation is set, so the Wordlist will list Tubal as a separate word and cain under Cain. We have entered the hyphen as a Word-medial punctuation character in our project in order to handle such words.
However, we also use - as a tone mark before a word. There is apparently no way to specify a word-initial punctuation character. I prefer to not list it under alphabetic characters, because it is not really a letter. It is a tone mark. In P9 we now get all the words with an initial - tone mark showing up as unknown in the Wordlist. This did not happen in P8. I suppose one option is to go through the Wordlist again and mark all these hundreds of “new” words as correct, but it would be nice if I was allowed to specify Word-initial punctuation. We also use + ^ : ! and / as initial tone marks, but the main problem right now is the double function of the hyphen as Word-initial and Word-medial. Of course, another option is to stick with P8 and ignore P9, but that results in other problems. Another problem is that I cannot specify / as an alphabetic character as I could in P7, because it is used as a separator and I can no longer choose another separator.
Maybe another option is to use two different hyphens, the standard and number 2013 and only list the one used for Word-medial punctuation in the language settings. The Number Settings allow for both initial, medial and final punctuation, although it does not allow 2013 as this is not a punctuation character in P9 although it was allowed in P8.

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Answer 1

Hello Iver+Larsen,
We have a similar ‘feature’ in that we distinguish bewteen - as a word medial tense marker, always followed by the Perfect Tense. So, those words could be ba-a or li-a etc. Although we have not in paratext made the distinction between such a grammatical hyphen and normal word medial hyphens, we have done so in MS Word, Indesign and Scripture App Builder. There we always use a non-breaking hyphen (0211) for words like li-a sunpo-i etcetera to distinguish from words that can be hyphenated. (words like Tubal-Kain would also get (0211)) If we wanted to incorporate that in paratext, and I think this could work in your case as well, we could use a tilde in the way some like to use the tilde for non-breaking spaces. It does not look nice in Paratext, but both for output via Indesign or Scripture App Builder you can apply a change table.
So you could feasably have just ~ba or with the hyphen ~-ba and enter all the combinations you need ~- ~+ ~: and ~! as digraphs in Paratext. (I have not tested this )
I hope this is helpfull for you.
goodgoan.

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Comments

I think you mean Unicode 2011
rqther than 0211

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Indeed, that is the one. Sorry for the confusion.

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Thanks. After some experimenting in both P8 and P9 I have decided that the best option for our situation is to use the n dash (2013) as the initial tone mark and the ordinary hyphen medially. The ordinary hyphen is then listed as medial punctuation, and the n dash is not listed anywhere, except in Number settings. (This is to allow for a longer dash in references that span more than one chapter). The n dash is also easier to spot which is fine for the tone mark that is otherwise sometimes missed by readers. I can temporarily list the tone marks (except /) in the alphabetic list if I want to check the words with tone marks.
P9 does not accept our tone mark / as an alphabetic character. It seems that no matter what I do, it is treated as a word-breaking character. I have tried other characters that look like a slash, but have not found a suitable one. I could use 2044 ⁄ fraction slash, but it is far from ideal. I might use it temporarily for checking purposes. One option might be to make the user define/adjust word-breaking characters for a particular project, but as far as I know this is not currently possible.

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I am using 8 and haven’t tried 9, so I’m not sure if my experience will help. But here goes anyway, for whatever it’s worth.

I also work with a project that uses a hyphen - as an initial tone marking, as well as in hyphenated names (they also use an apostrophe ’ as a tone marking). I had the same problem as you with it showing up as an unknown character. Very annoying since these tone markings are pretty common.

I tried a few different things, and found the best way to do it was to list the character(s) that can occur with the initial tone mark as combined alphabetic characters. So in the list of alphabetic characters, for T I have it listed this way:

t/T -t/-T t’/T’

This tells Paratext that t, T, -t, -T, t’ and T’ are all basically different ways to write the same letter. When I did this, it no longer brought up the - or ’ as unknown characters.

This also works with diacritics over or under the letter. This same project uses a tilde ~ under a vowel to mark a nasalized vowel, and it can occur with other diacritics, so I just listed all the possibilities as other options for the same vowel:

a/A ā/Ā á/Á a̰/A̰ á̰/Á̰ ā̰/Ā̰

I’ve no idea if this will work the same in P9.

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Answer 2

You might find this page (https://www.sil.org/orthography/fonts-and-technical-issues) helpful, particularly the link to the “Best practice when using non-alphabetic characters in orthographies” paper, which contains a table near the end discussing alternative characters.

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Comments

Thanks. Yes, I read this quite some time ago. For the hyphen tone mark, the best options for us is either the non-break hyphen (2011) or the n dash (2013). At the moment I am trying both before deciding finally.
There is no good substitute for the slash. In Paratext 7, we could use a different separator in the alphabetical list, but that option was lost in Paratext 8 and not reinstated in Paratext 9 as far as I know.
These choices were made in 1982. We might have made different choices today, but you cannot easily go back and change an established orthography.

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