On Tue, 25 Mar 2025, Claudio Beccari 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.
It has now become quite clear to me that these terms, though they often
don't follow the usual rules of the natural language in which they're
used, are not universal, so an exceptions list is the way to go. But
I think the list for US English may also be usable in other countries
where English is the common "indigenous" language -- UK, CA, AU, NZ, ...
So I will maintain that list separate from the list of "ordinary" US
exceptions, and anyone who needs it is welcome to it.
There are some prefixes that occur quite frequently, such as micro- and
macro-, and it would be good to have a way to have those recognized
automatically, since many words using them could be removed from an
exceptions list with just the ability to keep that prefix unhyphenated.
That is far beyond my ability, but I would be interested in learning
whether someone else has any ideas on the subject.
-- bb
