Syllabary text processing / Regex for syllabaries?

From: Daniel Yaqob (dmulholl@cs.indiana.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 10 1998 - 01:56:48 EST


Greetings all,

  I am currently cleaning up a public domain library for Ethiopic text
and information processing for release in late March (yes, Unicode
based!).

  A few cultural and linguistic norms aside, the bulk of the needs of
the writing system would be those required by any syllabic system of
writing. It occurs to me then (...should have thought of this sooner..)
that there may already be programming libraries out there for string
operations for syllabic text -is this the case?

  Having now gone though this experience of writing my own library, and
as I've come to spend more time with Perl and less with C, I've come to
conclude that what Ethiopic would most benefit from (following the
Unicode/ISO10646 standard) would be support in regular expressions
languages. 

  I would be very interested to know if there are current efforts to
advance regex languages and libraries for multilingualism, syllabaries
in particular. I have compiled some thoughts on the matter that I
believe demonstrate that syllabaries do have some needs that would
require extension to traditional regular expressions languages:

  ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/fidel/.work/regex.ps.gz

...also for those of you interested in Ethiopic IM, please find:

  ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/fidel/.work/imtables.ps.gz
and
  ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/fidel/sera-docs/sera-im.ps

thank you,

  -Daniel



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:39 EDT