Dear all, especially dear Barbara, The communications in this thread regarding phonetial and etymological hyphenation of chemical/medical/pharmaceutical terms is etremely interesting but is very marginal for Italian. In Italy q=we han an organisation the acronym of which is UNI, that by law deals all technical regulations concerning any human activity. In particular there is a regulation about hyphenation. According to this regulation hyphenation deals only with spelling so that “làvati” (whash yourself) and “lavati” “whashed” are hyphenated the same way. Diacritics are optional except on truncated words such as “però”, cioè”, “già”, and the like. But diacritics have no influence on hyphenation that is different from syllabification. The latter deals with linguistics, the former deals with typography. For chemical/medical/pharmaceutical terms etymological hyphenation is recommended but is not compulsory; therefore a word such as “discinesia” may be hyphenated as “di-sci-ne-sia” (general Italian spelling rule) and “dis-ci-ne-sia” (etymological rule}. The patterns I created for Italian contain several items that deal with prefixes such as “dis”, “trans”, “super”, anti, and others; but of course they do not form a complete list. I created also patters=ns to handle words with foreign roots such as wagneriano, newyorkese, newtoniano that contain break points not foreseen by the official regulations so as to have wag-ne-ria-no, new-yor-ke-se, new-to-nia-no; official regulations do not specify anything about words that contain k, j, w, x, y. I think I have done a pretty good work with Italian patterns, but of course they are not perfect; nevertheless in the past 20 years nobody submitted any error notification; I admit the Italian is very simple and grammatical sillabification and hyphenation are pretty easy to handle, but…
Therefore, for typesetting Italian documents, hyphenation lists are extremely rare; as for what concerns me, when I write about LaTeX or about electronics, I may insert just a couple of technical terms that I use very often in a specific document, but I use the active shortcut sign " (double straight quotes), defined as a possible break point, in certain words such as as foreign proper names, city names, and the like. I never use it, but the German word “Weltanschaung”, that has no translation in Italian but is being used very often in philosophical documents, when reviewing an Italian document draft I would insert were necessary the active shortcut sign “ as in “Welt”an”shaung”, that perhaps is correct in German. In any case the exceptions lists should be tied to specific languages and the lists you are working on should be connected only to US English, possibly also to other English varieties, not to other languages.
