Re: Word syntax question

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Miles Bader writes:
 > Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
 > >> > See char-script-table, forward-word also stops at a script boundary.
 > >> 
 > >> That seems kind of broken in this case -- it's quite common for
 > >> "phonetic" characters to be intermixed in a word with latin characters,
 > >> and certainly nobody thinks of those boundaries as being word
 > >> boundaries.
 > >
 > > I agree.  I think we should introduce a user option to control whether
 > > it stops on script boundaries or not, because sometimes it makes
 > > sense, sometimes it doesn't.
 > 
 > But a global setting seems far too course, and in general, whether it's
 > "right" or not seems like it depends more on the precise mixture of
 > scripts rather than a user's personal preferences.

AFAIK Unicode has solved this problem, but I forget where I saw it.
If my memory is correct, that supports Miles's opinion.

In general, I think that if the scripts are for different human
languages, it's almost always the case that a script boundary is a
word boundary.  (But I'm biased, because I deal with that daily in
ordinary Japanese text, where that is the case.)  If one script is not
language-specific (IPA is really the only one I can think of), it's
not.  Note that for something like Japanese which has three separate
scripts (hiragana, katakana, and kanji) which are separately
standardized (JIS X 0201 for katakana, and JIS X 0213 for the others)
this care for different scripts, same language already needs to be made.

So it seems to me that an exceptional case for IPA (make it a member
of all language groups, or perhaps of those that use the Latin
alphabet?) should be sufficient.