Arthur the two cases you are illustrating are not simple hypotheses,
they are real cases.
When I was in junior and in high school in my country, where I had eight
years of Latin, from 6th grade to 13th and I was from 10 to 18 years
old, I got a strong imprint about Latin; we started reading the
classics, the easy ones, such as Cesar's De bello gallico, and our
books, in spite of dealing with classical Latin used a totally modern
orthography: distinct u and v, no ligatures æ and œ, phonetic
hyphenation. The first patterns I conceived were actually a small
variation of Italian, and actually I published at the beginning of the
nineties an article on TUGboat dealing with one pattern set valid for
two languages, Italian and Latin. After a couple of years I admitted
that, even if it was feasible only for modern Latin and Italian, the
idea was not a good one, and I detached Latin patterns from the Italian
ones, and modified Latin patterns so as to include also the medieval
ones; may be I was directed to this goal by my reading of the book De
vulgari eloquentia, written in the XIII century by Dante Alighieri, in a
period of time when he was actually setting the bases for modern
Italian, but the scholarly works were still written in (medieval) Latin.
Just to tell something that is little known outside Italy, in high
school we read without difficulty the whole of Dante's Divine Comedy
written in XIII century Italian, while Chauser's Canterbury Tales
written in XIV century (middle) English are read today only translated
in modern English because apparently anybody else from a scholar does
not understand XIV century English.
It was the university latinists that complained about the inadequacy of
my (modern/medieval) Latin patterns with classical Latin. I explained
them that I did not create such patterns because I did not succeed in my
search of scholarly books dealing with such a problem; I also remarked
that hyphenation, as we consider it nowadays, started with "mechanical"
typography, i.e. with Gutenberg. Before that time handwritten codices
very often did not contain any line breaks obtained with word breaks,
and justification was obtained by enlarging or shrinking the scribe's
handwriting while using special signs such as the tilde over certain
vowels (librũ instead of librum) or barred stem q or p for other
shorthands. When none of these tricks was usable the line breaks were
obtained by breaking words without any syllabic concept. They finally
gave me the photocopies of some pages of an out-of-print book where I
was able to extract the rules to get the "correct" etymological
hyphenation of classical Latin. Of course they were "correct" according
to the author of that book.
Your second case is less likely, but not impossible; why would any one
typeset a Neolatin text, spelt (and hyphenatable) with post Council
Vatican II rules, with what is considered good classic spelling and
hyphenating as in pre Council Vatican I times? It would be something
such as wearing a Roman toga together with British modern leather shoes.
I understand that in Catholic monasteries they are very much concerned
with correct hyphenation, which for them means dividing words with
hyphens to match the musical score with lyrics when they have to sing in
Latin. But again this is not what we might call classical hyphenation
(spelling is generally in the modern variety) because singing is not
writing, nor speaking, nor reading. When you speak your phonetics are of
certain kind and when you sing phonetics may be completely different;
and when you read you don't speak nor sing; writing and hyphenating,
therefore, must adapt themselves to the purpose of the text: prose or
lyrics?
So let us establish this point: phoneticians require special analyses
to establish the meaning of "syllable"; nowadays they perform time
dependent Fourier analyses and trace the time dependent voice spectrum
to decide what is a syllable. Grammarians establish rules that may
divide syllables according to specific criteria that are completely
conventional. Typography adds some more constraints depending on the
purpose of the text. Neglecting the cases of u/v, ae/æ and oe/œ (that do
not forbid to hyphenate liturgical Latin with the conventional
phonetic/modern hyphenation) we have two conventional sets of rules that
I call phonetic and etymological. With the two sets preloaded in the
format files, and with suitable .ldf files for babel and polyglossia,
you can deal with both cases the way you like.
If in OFFO it is not possible to distinguish these two conventional
hyphenation systems I do not know what to suggest, because I had never
been involved with hyper text mark up and I do not know anything about it.
All the best
Claudio
On 11/03/2016 17:34, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 04:53:22PM +0100, Claudio Beccari wrote:
Yes, it is correct.
Good. Now consider the following use case: someone wants to typeset
speeches by Cato the Elder, using the classical spelling convention of
course, but that user doesn't like the patterns you devised for
Classical Latin, they want to use the other ones that produce phonetic
breaks (they're great fans of Pope John XXIII and want to use the
post-Vatican II conventions). They also know how to switch between
hyphenation patterns and are aware that there might be some minor issues
due to the u/v distinction that the modern patterns make.
Conversely, let's assume someone else wants to typeset a collection of
Papal bulls in modern Latin, making the u/v distinction, but they've
made the stylistic choice to actually use the patterns that break
according to etymology (they adhere strictly to Vatican I). They're
also aware of the underlying technical issues and are ready to solve
them as they encounter them.
Obviously, these use cases are not perfectly supported by the current
setup and users making the choices described in the above two paragraphs
should keep in mind that they may run into some problems. With that in
mind, wouldn't you agree that these are nevertheless reasonable use
cases?
Best,
Arthur
