Hyphenation

Hyphenation is the process of using a hyphen or another punctuation mark to connect two or more words together to form a compound word, or to split a word across lines of text. It can improve improve readability by either joining syllables or words, or breaking them apart at appropriate points. Hyphenation is often required when text is justified. These two concepts are closely tied together.

Hyphenation is generally a tool used in Latin typesetting, since it is not always allowed in other writing systems. Interesting behaviors occur in some Latin script use, as in the German word “backen” which becomes “bak-ken” when hyphenated (although there are moves for this to be abandoned). Hyphenation rules in publishing applications need to be fully customizable for these types of behaviors.

Hyphenation points can be inserted into a text manually through the use of the soft hyphen character (U+00AD SHY). This character disappears unless at the end of a line when it becomes a hyphen, and it also tells a line breaking engine that this is a hyphenation point.

Inserting soft hyphens manually is hard work. The resulting changes in the text can also get in the way of other processes, like searching. Most typesetting engines allow for a more automated approach whereby they use either a word list or some other language specific algorithms to decide on hyphenation points when such a decision is needed.

Ethiopic

One interesting case of different hyphenation methods is Ethiopic. Because Ethiopic was traditionally written using the Hulet Neteb there was no need for a hyphenation character. If a line broke at the end of a word the Hulet Neteb or other punctuation would be used. However, if a line broke in the middle of the word, the reader just saw the word break with no hyphen. In Figure 1, line two is “hyphenated,” line one is not.

Figure 1. Line-breaking in line two with use of Hulet Neteb (Ethiopic)

Figure 2. Line-breaking in line two with use of white space (Ethiopic)

The difficulty now arises that although word breaking still sometimes occurs this way but, with software limitations encouraging the use of white space between words (rather than the Hulet Neteb), it is difficult to know if there is a complete word at the end of a line or if it is a “broken” word (compare Figure 2 with Figure 1).

Portions of this content first appeared in Implementing Writing Systems, copyright © 2001 SIL International.