[tex-hyphen] A strange special case in Turkish hyphenation patterns for TeX

[Alex Kapranoff]

Hello.

Turkish hyphenation patterns are generated by a simple Ruby script available at 
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/language/hyph-utf8/source/generic/hyph-utf8/languages/tr 
which has this article by Pierre MacKay as its original source: http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb09-1/tb20mackay.pdf

A curious special case is mentioned by professor MacKay and then copied through all the incarnations of the algorithm -- that is, the pattern "2e2cek." which is supposed to
prevent splitting the "-ecek" suffix at the very end of a word. MacKay writes: "...nor do we really want the cek of -ecek broken off if it is at the end of a word" and then "The  pattern 
2e2cek. is added as a special case".

I am not a native Turkish speaker although my level is high enough to notice the omission. In Turkish, many suffixes have variants to satisfy vowel and consonant harmony requirements.
The other variant of "-ecek" is "-acak" which is used in words with wide (or back) vowels and there is no sense in adding "2e2cek." without also adding "2a2cak.".

I took the liberty to Cc: S. Ekin Kocabas and H. Turgut Uyar who might not be on the list to maybe help and clarify the issue. They are both mentioned as people who participated in development of the current version of Turkish patterns. Unfortunately, Pierre MacKay passed away earlier this year so there is no way to know the original reason of this tiny little inconsistency.