🚀 go-pugleaf

Bengt G{llmo (LMEBGO@kiera.ericsson.se) writes:
>Gabor Megyesi (gm115@emu.pmms.cam.ac.uk) writes:
>>Hungarian has a fairly easy rule for syllabification. If a word is
>>compound, it is first split into its constituent parts. A simple word is
>>split into as many syllables as there are vowels in it, and if there are
>>consonants between two vowels, the last one belongs to the second vowel,
>>the rest to the first. It is simple, it works, and I find the different
>>rules in other languages often confusing.
>
>That is exactly the rules I have learnt in Swedish.

Not really I hope. The same thought occurred to me, however the
issue is slightly more complex for Swedish (and I assume for
Hungarian too, surely it's Ro-zsa not Roz-sa, or?)

What you learn in school is the above plus the following exceptions:
"x" always belongs to the first vowel, thus it's vax-a (to vax) not
*va-xa. The same is true for the "ng" digraph: ring-a not *rin-ga.
(But: an-ge since it's a compound.) Other di- and trigraphs are entirely
referred to the second syllable: du-scha, lat-tja. Double-spelled
consonants are split, though: rin-na, bolst-ra, vys-sja. A special
feature are compounds where the first morphem ends with a double-
spelled consonant, and the second starts with the same. As one word,
there is no triple-spelling but when you hyphenate there is, so
"tillaga" becomes "till-laga".

However, real life is more complex. These rules are based on a simple
language, where the stress is always on the first syllable. But are
really prob-lem and frek-vens a good syllabification even in Swedish?
Fre-kvens and pro-blem feels much better to me, since that is close
to what I actually say. And even for "really" Swedish words, the rules
can be questioned. Is really bo-ken better than bok-en? In the latter
case, we have split on base word and the definite suffix.

And what you get in a modern, computer-hyphenated newspaper we shall
not even talk about. It's horrible.

Hyphenation should be done with care. When in doubt, not.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
N{r busen hejdar sin st}lskodda klack en centimeter innan din t}h{tta,
och v{ser "n{sta g}ng...", det {r d} du f}tt andrum till varnagel.