Dear Phil, You should know better. :-)
In 1993 you invited me to give a talk about hyphenation at RHBNC. I started out my lecture by demolishing the old chestnut that British is hyphenated etymologically while American isn't. Reality is much more blurry. Hugh Williamson got it right, as so often: The customs of word-division derive partly from etymology, partly from meaning, partly from pronunciation, and partly from tradition. Effective communication depends upon conventions, in word-division as elsewhere, and the best conventions are those the reader is likely to expect. The first part of a divided word should not mislead the reader about the pronunciation or meaning of the second part. Word-division for the benefit of the reader, however, is best determined by a reader’s perceptions; different customs apply to different words, and a few simple rules are not enough to find the right place. -- Methods of Book Design, pp. 48, 89. You are perfectly right, though, that a single set of patterns couldn't support British and American hyphenation at once. Their hyphenation points differ in approximately 30% of cases, that is for words that are spelt the same. Dominik On 12 September 2011 12:09, Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) < p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk> wrote: > > Jonathan Kew wrote: > > On 12 Sep 2011, at 08:59, Mojca Miklavec wrote: > > > >> Arthur had some plans to cover normalization in hyph-utf8, but I > >> already hate the idea of duplicated apostrophe, > > > > That's a bit different, and hard to see how we could avoid it except via > special-case code somewhere that "knows" to treat U+0027 and U+2019 as > equivalent for certain purposes, even though they are NOT canonically > equivalent characters and would not be touched by normalization. > > > > IMO, the "duplicated apostrophe" case is something we have to live with > because there are, in effect, two different orthographic conventions in use, > and we want both to be supported. They're alternate spellings of the word, > and so require separate patterns - just like we'd require for "colour" and > "color", if we were trying to support both British and American conventions > in a single set of patterns. > > It may be that you are intentionally putting up a straw-man argument here, > but if you are not, may I comment that "trying to support both British and > American conventions in a single set of patterns" would (IMHO) be > impossible, since British English hyphenation is based primarily on > etymology whilst American is based on syllable boundaries. I wish > I understood more about the "duplicate apostophe" problem, in order > to be able to offer a more directly relevant (and constructive) comment : > Google throws up nothing relevant. > > Philip Taylor > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex >
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