non-latin hyphenation?

From: Bob_Hallissy@sil.org
Date: Mon Apr 06 1998 - 12:49:39 EDT


Perhaps some of you know, or know of a good source for this info:

The background:

In most languages that use Latin script, words may be broken (at
certain allowed places) at the end of a line. We call this
hyphenation, and the hyphen character is usually displayed at the end
of the line to indicate the word is broken.

I know that in some non-Latin scripts, words can be broken across a
line but no symbol is used to indicate this. I believe many languages
based on Ethiopic script behave this way.

The question:

What other conventions exist for denoting an unusual (e.g.,
middle-of-word) line break? In particular, are there any natural
languages that denote a word break by a mark at the beginning of the
*second* line (rather than at the end of the first)?

(At this point, I'm not interested in the algorithms needed to
identify available inter-word break points, but rather how such breaks
are displayed.)

TIA,

Bob Hallissy
Summer Institute of Linguistics



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