[XeTeX] hyphenation in Ethiopian languages

[Jonathan Kew]

On 6 May 2011, at 18:03, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 14:42, Adam McCollum wrote:
>> Dear list members,
>> I've recently drawn up a short document in Ge`ez (classical Ethiopic) using
>> Polyglossia and I see that the hyphenation is wrong. As some of you know,
>> languages that use the Ethiopic script, including Ge`ez and Amharic, place a
>> word divider—it looks somewhat like a thick colon—between each word and two
>> of these dividers side by side between sentences; see some Amharic examples
>> here. That being the case, a word may be broken at any syllable (the script
>> is a syllabary, not an alphabet) at the end of a line, but there is nothing
>> corresponding to a hyphen. An additional matter of importance is that no
>> line should begin with the single or double word divider. How should this be
>> fixed?
> 
> Dear Adam,
> 
> We have submitted Ethiopic hyphenation patterns to CTAN (and TL) a
> while ago, so once you update you TeX Live, it should work out of the
> box.
> ......


For line-breaking after the word separators, doesn't it work to just set

  \XeTeXlinebreaklocale "en"
  \XeTeXlinebreakskip 0pt plus 1pt

or similar?

JK