[NTG-context] Re: italian words with apostrophe - hyphenation and discretionary

[mf <massifr@fastwebnet.it>]

Il 22/10/24 21:22, Hans Hagen via ntg-context ha scritto:
> On 10/22/2024 7:22 PM, Tomáš Hála wrote:
>>
>> Towards my previous post:
>>
>> I know that one can use \hyphenation{l'operaio} for solving the 
>> particular
>> word with article. The question is how to fix it generally (i.e. for all
>> words with article) via exceptions or by another way.
> 
> I'll send you both a file to play with
> 
> % \enabletrackers[languages.goodies]
> % \enabletrackers[languages.applied]
> 
> \setuplanguage[italian][goodies={lang-it-test.llg}]
> 
> \mainlanguage[italian]
> 
> \starttext
>      \start \hsize 10cm nella'opera \par \stop
>      \start \hsize 01mm nella'opera \par \stop
> \stoptext
> 
The test should be:

\starttext
      \start \hsize 10cm nell'opera \par \stop
      \start \hsize 01mm nell'opera \par \stop
\stoptext

"nell'opera" is an elision of the last vowel of "nella".
At the primary school I've been taught that the apostrophe was a 
teardrop of the first word, crying for the loss of its last letter (a 
nice allegory for kids).

Normally you'd never transform "nell'opera" back into "nella opera", 
even when there's a line break. These are usually preferred:

nel-l'opera   the best one
nell'o-pera   acceptable but a bit ugly
               (only one letter between the apostrophe and the hyphen)
nell'ope-ra   better than the previous one

That's because in "nella opera" you have two vowels one next to the 
other ("a" and "o"), that slow the spelling and make it more uncomfortable.
For the same reason sometimes we use an euphonic "d" to "break" the 
repetition of two vowels (especially when it is the same vowel):

1) "Max va a Milano" ("Max goes to Milan"), no vowel after the "a" 
("to") preposition;

2) "Max va ad Aosta", not "Max va a Aosta": (in these case we put a "d", 
otherwise we should say 3 consecutive "a" vowels)

Back to elision and hyphenation, I would resort to "nella opera" only in 
very particular cases:

- to prevent the hyphenation of the last line of a page (especially an 
odd page);

- when all the hyphenations of "nell'opera" (nel-l'o-pe-ra) result in 
ugly typesettings (e.g. many successive hyphenations, stretched word 
skips); this happens especially with narrow columns of text; it could be 
that "nella" at the end of a line, and "opera" at the start of the next 
one, make the typesetting result more pleasing.

Generalizing a rule (you can't)

It's hard to generalize a rule, because the elided articulated 
prepositions ("dell'", "all'", "dall'", "nell'") are the same for 
masculine and feminine words, but their un-elided versions depend on the 
gender: "dello", "allo", "dallo", "nello" for masculine, "della", 
"alla", "dalla", "nella" for feminine.
So an algorithm should know the gender of a word, and that makes it 
impractical.

Instead, the elided, indefinite article "un'" is always feminine, and 
could be automatically un-elided to "una".
But, even in this case, I would do it only when the alternative 
typesettings are really ugly. Here's an example ("un'istanza"):

  ...      una
istanza

could be preferable to:

  ...     un'i-
stanza

(a single "i" between an apostrophe and a hyphen is rather ugly), and 
also to:

  ... un'istan-
za

which could also be impractical because "un'istan-" may not fit in the 
first line.

Massi
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