All of this discussion about whether the hyphen is the proper character that should have been used or whether some holy, blessed POSIX/Unicode committee deemed - is valid for use as a letter or whether it can only be punctuation is probably interesting. But it's probably not interesting to Robert, who wants to know about his real world language.
He says he was the translator for this language. Now, I don't know about his particular case, but many such Bible translators are working with languages which are completely unwritten at the time that they start. One of their early tasks is creating an alphabet of usable characters - distinct from the IPA they use professionally because of the difficulty of using these on a computer - and it sounds like Robert's translation team chose the hyphen character as one of these. You might disagree and want to roast him for that choice, but older English speakers might wish to do the same to us for inventing the W and J characters unnecessarily. I would hardly consider ' to be a letter, but in the native Hawaiian language it is a letter representing a glottal stop. For the language under discussion, - is a letter. Argue it how you want, condemn it how you want, or contribute to helping come up with a solution if you want. Valid solutions do not include "Ignore it", "Leave it out" or "Change your language's orthography to include something else instead." Opinions like that, within this arena, are completely unconstructive the same way telling Germans to stop using letters with an umlaut because they do not appear on an American keyboard or in the English alphabet would not be constructive. I suggested allowing the valid numerals, punctuation marks and range specifying characters to be localized. DM has proposed a more detailed implementation with similar ideas. So can we get off our high horses about Unicode and POSIX locale purity and constructively talk about implementing a solution that allows Robert to use his language's Bible in our software, or are we going to say "Sorry, we won't support your language because it uses unapproved Unicode characters as letters"? --Greg _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
