[XeTeX] preventing hyphenation

[Jonathan Kew]

On 19 Feb 2011, at 17:29, Mike Maxwell wrote:

> On 2/19/2011 12:13 PM, Ulrike Fischer wrote:
>> Am Sat, 19 Feb 2011 00:13:03 -0500 schrieb Mike Maxwell:
>>> In a grammar we're writing, the gloss of a word "xowunʣāy" gets
> 
> just a comment, in the line above I meant "roman transcription", not "gloss."
> 
>>> hyphenated immediately after the 'x'.  I thought I could prevent this by
>>> adding the command
>>>     \hyphenation{xowunʣāy}
>>> near the beginning of the file (before the \begin{document} command).
>>> However, this has no effect; the word still gets hyphenated.
>>> 
>>> The paragraph of text in the input is
>>>     Applies to nouns (including verbal nouns) and
>>>     adjectives. \pusArabicScript{ښوون(ه)} /xowun(a)/  \emph{teaching};
>>>     \pusArabicScript{ښوونځای} /xowunʣāy/  \emph{schoolhouse}.
>>> where \pusArabicScript is our command to switch into Arabic script.
>>> 
>>> Any idea why the \hyphenation{} command is ineffective?
>> 
>> Did you activate the correct language?
> 
> Not sure what you mean here.  The default language of the grammar is English; we have not tagged /xowunʣāy/ as belonging to any language, so I'm assuming XeTeX thinks it's a funny-looking English word.

Just guessing here, but I think you might need to wait until after \begin{document} to give the \hyphenation{} exception, as that may be the point at which polyglossia sets the TeX \language appropriately. During the preamble it may not be easy to predict which language happens to be in effect, so the exception might be getting added to the wrong one.

JK