In the language we’re working in, there’s a (mostly) obligatory article before proper names, much like in Greek. I.e, ‘Abraam and Sara went’ would need to be:
O Abraam hai i Sara telǎrdǎs
The.M Abraam and the.F Sara went
If we enter key terms with \k o Abraam\k* then this breaks the sort order. If I manually enter the o/i outside the \k...\k* this is worse, because rather than keeping the paragraph together as I hoped, paratext splits the paragraph in two and the article is lost. I imagine that some languages using prefixed honorifics suffer similar problems.
I can think of 3 solutions for the moment, that don’t require manual glossary editing before we get to printing:
- Include the article in the keyterm and sort externally. This makes finding things a bit of a pain.
- Include the article after the keyterm
\k Abraam\k*,o and then write some kind of changes script to recognise and reorder them.
- Extend the definition of
\k so that it allows a default USFM3.0 attribute, which solves the scripting issues.
(a) just having the article as an attribute, it could be: \k Abraam|o\k*
(b) Alternatively, it might be preferable to have \k Printed form |internal representation\k* like with \w, where the internal representation informs linking and the sort order.
E.g. \k o Abraam|Abraam\k*`
Clearly 3(b) would need some programming effort. I don’t know what option 3 (a) would do to paratext’s internal mechanisms. Would it break the \w linking, etc?
I assume I’m not the first to face this. How have others solved this issue?
