[BRLTTY] Re: Speech enhancements

[Jason White]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 05:16:15PM +0000, Bill Haneman wrote:
> Regarding echo-by-word, we may wish to be careful to make this general
> and internationalizable.  In some languages, whitespace is not always
> used as a delimiter (this is particularly true of some Asian
> languages).  
I agree, although, interestingly, this appears to be less so in braille. For
example, apparently the most widely used Japanese braille system is
syllable-based, and the insertion of spaces to separate words is part of the
braille "translation" process. Disclaimer: I don't know any Japanese.

The concept of reading by words still applies, of course, but for the
scripts used to represent some languages one would need a more complicated
technique with which to determine word boundaries. Perhaps the word
identification function should be accessed via a pointer that can be updated
depending on the language of the input.