Irish Hyphenation
Kevin P. Scannell
Summary
This page describes the hyphenation patterns needed for proper typesetting of Irish language text using TeX, OpenOffice.org, GNU Troff, Scribus, Folio, and FOP. The patterns are derived automatically from a database of hyphenated words which should allow easy integration into other typesetting systems (as long as they are Free Software).
You can also read a short article I've written that treats the development of these hyphenation patterns for Irish, and discusses the development of computing resources for minority languages more generally.
Download
- The file gahyph.tex (for use with (La)TeX and GNU troff) can be downloaded from CTAN.
- The file hyph_ga_IE.zip (for use with OpenOffice.org or Scribus) can be downloaded from the OpenOffice.org site.
- Since the Apache license is incompatible with the GPL, the patterns cannot be distributed with the FOP codebase. You'll need to download ga.xml directly and install it on your own.
See the Usage page for instructions on how to install and use the patterns with LaTeX.
Contributing
I know of no explicit standards for hyphenation of Irish. Instead I relied upon:
- a small initial database of hyphenated words from actual printed material,
- hyphenations inserted automatically according to certain morphological rules, and
- statistical methods to bootstrap to a larger database.
Occasionally I had to resort to my own (poor) judgement. Therefore the resulting rules are far from perfect and likely reflect my idiosyncratic preference for etymological/morphological hyphenation over phonological. Please see the Details page for more information on what I did and for some concrete examples.
If you'd like to help improve future releases, the easiest way is to use the patterns to typeset your own documents and report any problems you encounter. Alternatively, you can look for errors among the Top 1000 most frequent words in Irish, hyphenated according to the current pattern set.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.