On Wednesday, December 17, 2003, at 07:34 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:
Is it still customary when entering lyrics to use an apostrophe and dropped vowel to indicate a "merged" syllable in English (i.e., where the word as sung has fewer syllables than the dictionary hyphenation)? Or is that an archaic practice?
In other words, should a two-syllable "opening" be written
"o-pening"
or
"o-p'ning"
For this example, I would choose "o-p'ning". I don't know that I'd generalize that as a rule to always use apostrophe, though. In other contexts it might be clearer to spell out what looks like two syllables but is pronounced as one.
This is assuming that the melody is using the word in an ordinary way. If one is deliberately putting a space in the middle of the word with the "p" sound before the break -- as in "another ope-ning, another show..." -- then that's a special effect calling for a special hyphenation. In that case, I would use "ope-ning" -- or alternatively "op'-ning", but definitely not "op-'ning".
I don't like "op-'ning" (as another poster recommended) under any circumstances, because I think it encourages the singer to pronounce the first syllable as one would in "op-era", "op-tion", or "op-por-tu-ni-ty". An important function of hyphen placement in English -- the most important, I'd say -- is to indicate, by the presence or absence of a consonant at the end of a syllable, whether the syllable's vowel should be short or long.
The comparison to "ev-'ning" makes no sense to me. "Evening" is a two-syllable word to begin with, so it is properly "eve-ning" or, if you insist on an apostrophe, "ev'-ning". If you really are using a contraction of the less common three-syllable word (ie, the gerund or participle of the verb "even"), then it should indeed be "e-v'ning". I can't think of any case in which "ev-'ning" is proper.
--
To put it another way, which perhaps can serve as a general guideline, imagine that you're seeing only the letters that appear before the hyphen: What would you sing?
If you see, "o-", it rhymes with "hoe".
If you see, "op-", it rhymes with "hop".
If you see, "ope-", it rhymes with "hope".
If you see, "op'-", it still rhymes with "hope" if you're careful, but it's easy to overlook the apostrophe and say "hop" by mistake.
Likewise for "e-", "ev-", "eve-" and "ev'-" in the various permutations of "evening".
mdl
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