Re: hyphenation patterns

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

Dear Claudio,

Thanks a lot for your prompt reply.

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 00:39, Claudio Beccari wrote:
> Dear Mojca,
> no proper Italian word ends in ch (this digraph in normal Italian words is
> pronunced as k, not as č or ć).
> Nevertheless there are a number of surnames dating back to the old times
> (150 years ago) when North East Italy was under Austro-Hungarian ruling,
> when Istrian names, mainly Croatian and Slovenian, where transliterated in
> such a way that the tipical patronimic ending  -ič or -ić (I don't know the
> exact spelling in Latin letters of the Croatian/Slovenian names) was
> transliterated for the Empire bureaucracy with -ich.

Thanks a lot for some more insight. I admit that I didn't know the
details (I should be ashamed) and in my area they were more radical
with surname changes (mine was Michelazzi and I think that most
surnames here were "properly Romanized", for example Filipčič ->
Filippi, so again no problems with hyphenation :) :) :).

> This spelling remained
> when North East Italy and Istria were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy at the
> end of WW1. After WW2 most of Istria returned mainly to Croatia and a small
> part to Slovenia, but the Slovenians and Croatians that had moved the NE
> Italy and had become Italian citizens maintained their surnames with the
> Austro-Hungarian spelling.
>
> When I prepared the hyphen patterns for Italian ad Latin I did think to
> this particular spelling, but I concluded that it was not so important; I
> was wrong, and I apologize.

There's no need to apologize. First, there's an "infinite" number of
foreign names, so that one simply cannot get all of them right. I
guess that Lju-bl-ja-na is not properly hyphenated either (Lu-bia-na
is ok), but in my opinion it's a valid argument that one should change
the language when writing foreign names if they are to be hyphenated
properly. I can also easily imagine Slovenian patterns that would
hyphenate:
    Fis-cher, Aac-hen, Go-ethe
when not knowing that those letters represent a single "letter"/sound
in foreign words.

Second, I have no idea, but I think it was a pure coincidence that the
"problem" reported by Rogutės Sparnuotos is the same as that for
surnames of a group of people on North-East (I think that the name in
question comes from Russia with translitaration done by English). On
the other hand if it's just a tiny pattern that solves them all ...

> I will submit, at least for Italian, a revised
> pattern file. I doubt I should do it also for Latin, although it does not
> cost anything...

In case you do submit any updates, I would be extremely grateful for
submitting an update to
   http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/language/hyph-utf8/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/hyph-it.tex
instead of (or at least in addition to) the original file (you may
remove the initial comments).

Also, if you happen to have the original of
   http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb13-1/tb34becc.pdf
it would be nice to include it into repository as documentation about
Italian hyphenation (but that's all too off-topic for the ConTeXt
mailing list).

Thanks again,
    Mojca
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