Dear XSLT List,
>David> What I'm groping for, then, is an elegant rule-based
>David> function that lets me write a small number of rules by
>David> defining classes of letters to which they apply, something
>David> like "after 'S', 'Z', 'C', 'St', and Zd', 'y' is replaced
>David> by 'E'."
> Have you checked to see if the classes can be deduced from the Unicode
> database? In Unicode 5.1.0, this is now available as an XML dataset.
The classes are not amenable to definition in terms of Unicode
properties; in linguistic terms they are along the lines of "palatal
fricatives and affricates." (In an effort to avoid using actual medieval
Cyrillic characters in my email, including Unicode 5.1 characters, I
converted my real problem into a hypothetical one using ASCII letters,
which had the unfortunate side-effect of obscuring that detail. In real
life in the example above, "S" and "Z" stand for voiceless and voiced
palatal fricatives, "C" is a voiceless palatal affricate, "y" is a high
back tense vowel, and "E" is a front nasal vowel.)
But your suggestion points to a way of conceptualizing the problem that
occurred to me, but that I didn't know how to implement using
XPath/XSLT, viz., can I define a class of items and then write a
conditional rule that tests whether a character is a member of that
class? That is, using the example above, can I define $palatal as the
set of ('S', 'Z', 'C', 'St', and 'Zd') and then write a rule along the
lines of "in any sequence of a member of the $palatal class followed by
'-' followed by 'y', the '-' is deleted and the 'y' is replaced by 'E'"?
Sincerely,
David
djbpitt+xml(_at_)pitt(_dot_)edu
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