On Friday, December 19, 2003, at 12:39 PM, Weldon Whipple wrote:
I disagree completely with Mark. If you compare the "wrong" hyphenation of
older scores with dictionaries of the time, you will find that most of the
hyphenation corresponds with the syllabification found in those
dictionaries.
I think someone is misrepresenting me here. I am certainly not advising people to defy their dictionaries and use a different set of rules. I do indeed believe you should follow the dictionary. My point here is that the dictionaries themselves follows a very definite logic, and I am trying to explain to you what that logic is. The goal is to be able to agree with the dictionary by already knowing what the dictionary is going to say without having to look.
I am not the one who invented the idea that a short-voweled initial syllable gets the consonant and the long-voweled initial syllable does not. This idea is right there in the dictionary, implicit in every choice that it makes. I am speaking descriptively, not prescriptively. Study your favorite dictionary yourself, and tell me if you come to a different conclusion.
Now if you want to have to consult the dictionary for every single word you ever hyphenate, and if you want to be clueless if you happen upon a proper name or neologism that your dictionary doesn't list, go right ahead. I just think it's useful to understand the logic behind the rulings, so that you don't always wonder "Gee, is it ev-er and e-ven, or e-ver and ev-en?"
mdl
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