fix: boundary treats combining marks as word characters, like Ruby - #11
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Ruby's \b counts combining marks (Arabic diacritics) as word characters; Python's \w does not — Mn is not alphanumeric. At a hamza-carrier + kasra junction Ruby saw no boundary while Python did, so every word-final rule (X + boundary -> "'a") fired wrongly and doubled vowels: دَائِم became dā'aim instead of dā'im. The boundary now compiles to an explicit word/non-word transition over a word class that includes combining marks. Through the Ruby bridge, alalc-ara: 10 failures -> 4.
This was referenced Oct 1, 2026
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Ruby's
\bcounts combining marks (Arabic diacritics) as word characters; Python's\wdoes not — Mn is not alphanumeric. Proven with a two-line test:ئ\bon دَائِم does not match in Ruby, does in Python. Every word-final rule (X + boundary → "’a") therefore fired wrongly, doubling vowels — دَائِم → "dā’aim" instead of "dā’im".The boundary now compiles to an explicit word/non-word transition whose word class includes combining marks (0300–036F, Arabic diacritics 064B–065F, 0670, Quranic annotation 06D6–06ED), pinned by a spec on the hamza-carrier/kasra junction both ways.
Through the Ruby bridge against the ISC corpus: alalc-ara goes 10 failures → 4 (dā’im, mala’a, al-miṣrī, al-ghazzī, al-aṣl all heal; zero regressions). Builds on #10's Ruby-exact selection ordering.