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According to an online hyphenator, the hyphenation of ‘editorial’ is

ed-it-or-ial

in British English and

ed-i-to-rial

in American English. I'm interested in the hyphenation of the noun ‘editorial’. (There is also an adjective with the same spelling; I don't care about it.)

  1. Is the online tool right at least for the Britisch English version?

  2. Why is there such a difference?

1 Answers1

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There aren't actually single nation-wide standards about how to hyphenate words. The tool is just based on two specific conventions that are common, but not universal in their respective countries. There are various principles about how to hyphenate words, and by assigning different relative weights to these principles, many different specific hyphenation patterns may be derived.

The "British English" hyphenation on that web site is apparently based on a list provided by the Oxford University Press. It seems to use more morphological or etymological hyphenation: the word "editorial" is hyphenated in a way that corresponds to the end of the words "edit" and "editor".

The US hyphenation is apparently based on the "Plain TeX hyphenation tables", which in turn seem to have been based on Webster's Dictionary. It seems to use more phonological hyphenation: the word "editorial" is hyphenated in a way that doesn't break apart the stressed syllable "to", and the "r" is put in the onset of the following syllable in accordance with the widely recognized principle of "maximizing onsets" in syllabification whenever possible. (Webster would have syllabified the "d" of "editorial" with the first syllable because of the preceding short vowel sound, but traditionally, the "o" in "editorial" was a long vowel.)

I don't know the motivations behind the hyphenations in Webster's Dictionary, but the use of more pronunciation-based hyphenation might be related to Noah Webster's preference for basing spelling on pronunciation rather than on etymology (when possible).

herisson
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  • Thx! Regarding "Plain TeX hyphenation tables": taking the exception list known as ushyphex into consideration or not? –  Feb 11 '19 at 03:21
  • The American English hyphenation has nothing to do with TeX—TeX's hyphenation tables are based on Webster's dictionary, which decided how to hyphenate the words in the 19th century, back when we pronounced them differently. If they went back and re-hyphenated it today, they would probably keep the "or" together, because together they make up an r-influenced vowel. – Peter Shor Feb 11 '19 at 03:22
  • @user0: The exceptions list is supposed to be from "Tugboat", whatever that means. I think this is the GitHub source page: https://github.com/hunspell/hyphen – herisson Feb 11 '19 at 03:24
  • I'm saying that Donald Knuth did not come up with the hyphenations; he took them from Webster's dictionary. – Peter Shor Feb 11 '19 at 03:28
  • @PeterShor IMHO, that's also not fully true. DEK created patterns from a dictionary automatically, and then allowed for an exception list to keep the number of patterns low. –  Feb 11 '19 at 03:31
  • @PeterShor: That makes sense, and corresponds with what is said here, but can you point me to a source so that I can verify that the hyphenation table is based on Webster's dictionary? – herisson Feb 11 '19 at 03:31
  • @sumelic: This paper says Knuth started with the hyphenations in the 1966 edition of Webster's pocket dictionary. – Peter Shor Feb 11 '19 at 03:34
  • @user0: DEK's goal for his algorithm, was that, when combined with his exception list, it would reproduce the hyphenations in Webster's pocket dictionary exactly. – Peter Shor Feb 11 '19 at 03:39
  • @PeterShor: That dictionary seems to have been used to make the TEX82 hyphenation algorithm that Liang worked on. – herisson Feb 11 '19 at 03:40
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    @sumelic—you're right. Reading more carefully, Knuth and Liang came up with a hyphenation algorithm, and then Liang improved it so that it got nearly all the words correct. – Peter Shor Feb 11 '19 at 03:44
  • @PeterShor Not "exactly", but "nearly". The paper you cited and Liang's thesis said that they decided not to worry about specialized technical terms. –  Feb 11 '19 at 03:47
  • Could you provide us with a reference to 'the widely recognized principle of "maximizing onsets" in syllabification'? –  Feb 11 '19 at 04:39
  • Googling Maximal Onset Principle yields a bunch of results, including this one. – Peter Shor Feb 11 '19 at 12:13
  • @user0: the way I read the description of what they did, Liang first got all the hyphenations in Webster's pocket dictionary right, and then tested his algorithm on the hyphenations in a larger dictionary, They then decided not to worry about many of the rarer and more technical words it got wrong from the larger dictionary, although they fixed some of them. – Peter Shor Feb 11 '19 at 12:27