[tex-hyphen] no hyphenmin for French?

[Arthur Reutenauer]

	Hello Karl,

> Why no \lefthyphenmin and \righthyphenmin values for French in
> hyph-utf8?

  We didn't put hyphenmin values in hyph-utf8 for languages that did not
already have some settings in their pattern files; it was the case for
French, amongst many others.

>             Can French hyphens really happen at one lettr-
> e ?

  You would of course not see that in general, although things like a-
symétrique wouldn't shock me, since a- is clearly a distinct part of the
word on both phonological and morphological accounts (and even on the
account of spelling, that would normally have "assymétrique", as
intervocalic 's' are usually pronounced /z/, which is not the case
here).  I wouldn't be surprised if people used such hyphenations in some
contexts, like newspapers in narrow columns, for example (I could sample
issues of the local paper that I happen to have here, but I'm afraid you
would find much more dubious typographic choices in the _Télégramme de
Brest_ ;-)

> Tried to research on web, sources, etc., no luck.

  One of the people I would ask about that would be Daniel Flipo, who
contributed to the work on the original French patterns for TeX, twenty
years ago.  I already meant to ask him about the absence of any
hyphenation exceptions in the pattern file, but never took the time to.

	Arthur