[Sorry for top-posting.] The situation is very similar in Spanish, but some special rules can be still necessary. So, while the group ft is always divided (eg, dif-te-ria), in chemical compounds it’s best kept together (eg, fe-nol-fta-leí-na). The problem is nomenclature can combine a few elements (well, no so few) in very very long “words” and freely (if the chemical compound makes sense), particularly in Organic Chemistry (but not only — the IUPAC Red Book provides many examples). So a pattern with ‘ftal’ makes more sense than a list of exceptions with many possible names containing it.
Javier On Tue, Mar 25, 2025 at 10:01 AM Claudio Beccari <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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. > > >
