Re: hyphenation patterns

From: Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>
To: mailing list for ConTeXt users <ntg-context@ntg.nl>
Subject: Re: hyphenation patterns
Date: Sun, 23 May 2010 23:38:07 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <AANLkTilL2unqRqMpI4Zg8gjaHwhFiPon0lKDJMuNU_1h@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20100523232209.GA12038@urvas>

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 01:22, Rogutės Sparnuotos wrote:
>
> \setuplayout[textwidth=0.2cm]
> \starttext
> \language[la] Manovich.
> \stoptext
>
> hyphenates 'Manovich' into Ma-no-vi-ch, while it should be Ma-no-vich. The
> same applies for Italian and Lithuanian languages (in LaTeX as well).
>
> Could there be such an omission in the hyphenation patterns? Or am I
> missing something?

Both Italian and Latin have the pattern "1c" meaning "break in front
of any letter c unless another patterns prohibits that". Lithuanian
patterns contain "i1c" which means "break between i and c".

Nothing in ConTeXt can or will be fixed, but here's a short answer
with four options of what you can do:
1. Use \hyphenation{Ma-no-vich} on top of your document
2. Use "Manovič" instead of Manovich (it then hyphenates properly in
Latin at least, I didn't try the others); or "Манович" :)
3. Use \mainlanguage[la] bla bla bla {\language[en] Manovich}
4. Complain to the authors of Italian/Latin/Lithuanian patterns and
ask them for a fix.

Some explanation:
I assume that this is not a native Latin, Italian or Lithuanian word.
If you are talking about the artist name (Lev Manovich) then you are
using English transliteration of Russian word and expect it to
hyphenate properly in Italian. Italian is a
what-you-see-is-what-you-pronounce language (in contrast to English)
and you cannot expect that it will hyphenate properly all the foreign
names that are not even transliterated "properly". An Italian word
would most probably never end with "ch", so there's currently no
pattern present that would prohibit that behaviour. I don't know
Russian enough, but I would blindly guess that the right
transliteration would be Manovič anyway (of course everyone would have
a problem with getting the right accent and with proper pronounciation
then) and German wikipedia somehow confirms that:
Lev Manowitsch (russ. Лев Манович, wiss. Transliteration Lev Manovič;
* 1960 in Moskau)
Note that Germans transliterate the name differently and Italians
could transliterate it in a different way as well. Since Lithuanian
contains the letter "č", I would assume that they would transliterate
the name with č anyway (disclaimer: my knowledge about Lithuanian is
zero, so I'm not even sure how they pronounce that letter). For
example particular - Serbian will never have a problem with
hyphenation of foreign names:
    http://sr.wikipedia.org/sr-el/Алберт_Ајнштајн
    Albert Ajnštajn (nem. Albert Einstein) je bio teorijski fizičar ...

The question is always: how many different foreign names to you want
to hyphenate properly in any given language?

On the other hand, even with Italian pronunciation, I guess that ch is
considered to be a "single consonant" (I may be wrong in that, but
it's not too relevant either), so adding an additional pattern "2ch."
(or "4ch.", not sure which one is needed) cannot hurt.

Mojca
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