[sword-devel] Hyphens in book names

[Robert Hunt]

On 30/09/10 11:06, Chris Little wrote:
> Seriously? Someone designed an orthography in which \x2D 
> (hyphen-minus) is used as an alphabetic character? What's its phonemic 
> value?
Oh! I guess I've been using hyphenated words in English since I learnt 
to write. I unthinkingly used it in the word "work-around" in my 
original email below. What Unicode character does that get encoded as?
>
> Hyphen-minus is simply not a letter. You can see its character 
> properties at 
> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2d/index.htm. Scroll down 
> to see that the value of isLetter() is No. Hyphen-minus is punctuation.
>
> Sword should not be modified to accommodate abuses of the Unicode 
> Standard. If you can find a hyphen-like letter in the Unicode 
> character repertoire, I would suggest changing to that (in all cases). 
> Letters will indicate that they are letters in their character 
> properties. If there is no such character, you should propose one to 
> Unicode.
"Abuse" sounds pretty strong to me in this context. It makes one really 
wonder whether Unicode defines the world, or whether language came first 
and Unicode came later? However, I guess using a different Unicode 
character would be a satisfactory work-around if the user could find a 
way to type that character (and knew to do it)???
>
> --Chris
>
> On 9/29/10 1:55 PM, Robert Hunt wrote:
>> New Zealand.
>>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I am spending today studying the documentation on the Crosswire Sword
>> wiki so I'm likely to have a few questions. Please let me know if this
>> is not the right forum to ask questions.
>>
>> I see in http://www.crosswire.org/wiki/DevTools:SWORD that localised
>> book names are not allowed hyphens in them (because the hyphen is used
>> for verse ranges). In the Philippine language that we worked with as
>> Bible translators, the hyphen is a letter in the alphabet and appears in
>> several book names!
>>
>> Is this still a current limitation? If so, what is the suggested
>> work-around.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Robert.
>