[tex-hyphen] Dictio-nary ?

[Claudio Beccari]

British and US English are certainly peculiar.

I have a Webster’s New World Speller/Divider book dated 1971. Is is based on the Webstr=er’s New World Dictionary according to its title page.

The word “dictionary” is divided as dic-tion-ary. Personally I think that dic-tio-na-ry is also correct, although the hyohenmins settings do not allow two-letter final syllables. But I am not a linguist and English is not my mother language, thefore my opinion is worthless.

I can’t compare these rules with the Italian ones, because these ones are based on spelling and not on pronunciation/stress. Furthermore Italian hyphenmins are 2 and 2, therefore no comparison is possible.

In English rules are very different and words that are spelled the same way but are pronounced with different stress, are hyphenated in a different way: example: “the analyses” vs. “he analyses” should be hyphenated as “anal-yses” vs. “analys-es”: in general the tonic vowel remains attached to the following consonant.

There is no exception list that can solve this problem and any pattern set misses the correct hyphenation in one of these two words.

All the best
Claudio



> On 16 May 2024, at 12:59, Arthur Rosendahl <arthur.reutenauer at normalesup.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 01:06:12PM +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
>> One can argue that given the many (unpredictable) ways to pronounce english
>> without knowing the word, one should make sure not to end up with a split
>> that makes it hard to guess what the whole word is (is prnounced) when one
>> is at the end of a line.
> 
>  As a general principle, that’s unobjectionable, but how does it help
> us in this case?  Diction-ary, dictio-nary?  I really can’t tell.
> 
> 	Arthur