Re: lyrics for right-left writing systems such as hebrew or arabic

[demery]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009, Richard Schoeller <address@hidden> said:

> One common approach when combining a right-to-left language with 
> left-to-right musical notation is to render each syllable of the lyrics 
> right-to-left but have the overall flow of the music left-to-right.  I 
> haven't tried this with any of the stuff that I've done (I present the 
> lyrics in transliteration).  So, I can't tell you how well this works in 
> LilyPond.

However it is done, and by whatecer program, there are some pretty hefty
issues for position-contextual writing systems such as arabic.  Arabic
letters have variant shapes when used in different positions (opening,
middle, closing); fragmenting a wordd into sylables exposes middle
letters; not at all sure the common reader is used to seeing that. 
Further, when placed correctly under the music they will be presented in
backwards order:

  hava nagilla

is shown as
   
  ah - av_   an - lig - al_ 

which is less of a challenge for a markup-based entry system like lilypond
than it is for a GUI-based system that attempts WYSIWYG editing of the
lyrics in place (of interest here should we someday go for that).  The
challenge being to re-order the syllables (unnaturally) as the user splits
the words for us.
-- 
Dana Emery