How to avoid dropping word-initial and word-final apostrophes?

[Willem3141]

I'm trying to make a voice for the conlang Na'vi. One peculiarity of Na'vi is that it uses apostrophes for glottal stops, and they can occur also in the beginning and end of words. For example, 'eylan and eylan are distinct words that should be pronounced differently: one with a clear glottal stop, and the other without.

Sadly espeak-ng is dropping these apostrophes by treating them as punctuation. I've already discovered the setting punct_within_word and set it to { '\'', 0 } in tr_languages.c. This works for apostrophes in the middle of the word, but not for ones in the beginning and end. I think this is because the code checks if the previous character is alphanumeric.

Is there another way to get espeak-ng not to drop these? There must be other languages that have this problem, right?

[jaacoppi]

I don't think there's any option at the moment. If you write a patch to implement it, make it a language options in langopts.c instead of tr_languages.c