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 <[email protected]> [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. >
