[tex-hyphen] Why does "\-" not work?

[Barbara Beeton]

On Sun, 21 Aug 2016, Adrian Fronda wrote:

    Dear Barbara, dear Phil,

    Thank you for your e-mails.
    I have added
    \selectlanguage{british}
    in the root file before the inclusion of all files, but it did not help. No automatic hyphenating happens and no hypenating occurs when I use ?\-?.

    Also when I follow Phil's remark and write
    \hyphenation{im-pas-sive-ly} impassively 
    the word ?impassively? is not hyphenated as it should. 

    Do you have any other ideas? As I said, ideally I would prefer to use ?\-? to the more cumbersome \hyphenation{} command. 

perhaps it wasn't entirely clear --
the \hyphenation{...} command is
intended to be used *in the preamble*,
where it will (is supposed to) affect
*all* instances of the specified word(s)
in the entire text.  so if a particular
word occurs frequently near the end of
a line, that is a more less labor
intensive method.

however, the failure of \- to work
at all is very mysterious.

like claudio, whose response i have now
read, i constructed a small test file,
but created the text myself, setting at
the right margin a word whose hyphenatin
is known to be faulty (or at least very
peculiar) using the british patterns.

as claudio found, there is no problem
with any of the packages you load, so
the problem must be in one of your text
files.
					-- bb

here is the test file i used:

\documentclass[14pt, oneside, a4paper]{book}
\pagestyle{headings}

\author{\href{mailto:Adrian at TransnationalRepublic.org}{Adrian\
Fisipojakene}}
\title{Beletristics}
\date{\today}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[german,british]{babel}
\selectlanguage{british}
\usepackage{cjhebrew}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\usepackage{url}
\usepackage[authoryear,round,semicolon]{natbib}
\makeindex

\usepackage{makeidx}
\usepackage{lmodern}

\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage{verbatim}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[pdftex,unicode=true,%
bookmarks,plainpages=false]{hyperref}

\begin{document}
\frontmatter
\maketitle

\mainmatter

Here is some text that should occupy more than one line.  x The word
alternate is placed to appear at the end of a line, where, according
to the preloaded hyphenation rules (faulty) for British, it should be
hyphenated incorrectly.

Here is some text that should occupy more than one line.  x The word
alter\-nate is placed to appear at the end of a line, where, according
to the preloaded hyphenation rules (faulty) for British, it should be
hyphenated incorrectly.

Here is some text that should occupy more than one line.  The word
alternate is placed to appear at the end of a line, where, according
to the preloaded hyphenation rules (faulty) for British, it should be
hyphenated incorrectly.

\end{document}