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

[H. Turgut Uyar]

Hi,

My contribution to the Turkish hyphenation patterns was at the end of
the 90s and mostly toward adapting it to recent encodings. I also
probably added or removed a few letters that were or weren't used in
modern Turkish.

Although I'm a native speaker, I'm not a linguist but you're right about
the curiousness of that special "-ecek" case. I've never heard of any
such special case and it doesn't make sense to me. You're also right
about the general vowel harmony rule that would dictate that there be a
similar rule for "-acak". I don't know if I'm overlooking something here
but I feel like it would be better to remove the "-ecek" special rule.

All the best,

--
H. Turgut Uyar <uyar at itu.edu.tr> [GPG KeyID: 0x1E18F231]
http://web.itu.edu.tr/uyar/

On 07-10-2015 01:41, Alex Kapranoff wrote:
> 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.
>