For irregular verbs, I was studying leer, caer, and oir, I came across 'triphthong'
This is what I came across while studying. I looked it up in the dictionary and couldn't find it. It is used in this sentence...
To prevent the creation of a triphthong, the i changes to a y in the 3rd person singular and plural of these verbs.
Could someone explain to me what triphthong is and what that is about'
38 Answers
Lazarus wrote:
This I find very weird, because to me, nd is not a digraph, but two letters pronounced separately, and I'd say that blen- is clearly one syllable, and -ding another, phonetically speaking. I would have never done such a division.
For what it's worth ... In cryptanalytic circles, "digraph" is used to refer to pairs of (adjacent) letters considered (for the purposes of analysis/substitution) as a unit. e.g. in the Playfair cipher.
Of course, this is not a cryptanalytic circle nor a discussion about cryptanalysis.
Consonant digraphs and blends are never separated. blend-ing not blen-ding.
Lazarus wrote:
This I find very weird, because to me, nd is not a digraph, but two letters pronounced separately, and I'd say that blen- is clearly one syllable, and -ding another, phonetically speaking. I would have never done such a division.
When we pronounce the word blending, it is actually closer to sounding like blen-ding, so this rule is just stating that despite the pronunciation, the hyphenation must not split the digraph nd (it is a digraph in the word blend).
Anyway, as I said in my post that mysteriously vanished, there are indeed rules to hyphenation (albeit not universally applied rules), but those rules are fairly complicated (my post was pretty long), so most native English speakers don't remember them all, which is why we always use a dictionary to check hyphenation when we aren't sure.
Why would your teacher say that? That's crazy. In high school English, students are taught (used to be anyway) how to hyphenate correctly. I remember also learning rules in grade school for how to break a word into syllables, but I don't remember exactly what they were.
The simple method is to look up the word in the dictionary to see how it's broken into syllables (for sure) and only hyphenate between syllables.
You want to follow common sense and not make your hyphenation look ridiculous, such as by hyphenating a word that's already hyphenated again in a second place. Also, don't leave just one letter dangling.
lazarus1907 said:
James Santiago said:
I posted a list of rules for you (was it in another thread'), and while I don't know if those are the "official" rules, it isn't correct to say there are no rules.
I don't recall those rules, James, sorry. I just remember that one of my English teachers taught me that there are no rules in English, and you could split any word anywhere you want. From my experience as a reader, this seems to be true, but maybe there is a pattern I haven't noticed. For example, I have a book here that writes "...hav - ing" and "prob- lems". That looks weird to me.
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Neil Coffey said:
After all that, of course, my main point was really that, within such a hyphenation system (whether you agree with it or not), the chosen convention is not to hyphenate at the syllable boundary-- i.e. a system such as Latex will not hyphenate the word as supe-rable.
LaTeX is just a system, not a conscious living being that has a feeling for languages, and it is not the ultimate and definite system that will eventually supersede all human typographers either. Hyphenation rules in Spanish, far from being perfect, of course, are far more logical than in English, French or many other languages, and they are particularly flexible from the point of view of etymology, as you clearly already know. The decision on whether hyphenate in these cases or not it is ultimately a personal decision, but I prefer if it is done by an informed human rather than a machine than just count beans.
One of the reasons why English spelling is so absurd is because typographers decided to add and remove letters just to ensure that the text was justified, and looked nice. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't like my language to become even more random by taking arbitrary decisions about orthography for the sake of getting nice looking paragraphs, and even less if they come from a computer program.
The hyphenation convention is based on systematic rules for most cases, plus some recommendations about things that should ideally be avoided (for aesthetic reasons), plus common sense. Computers don't understand these last two reasons.
Yes, but these aren't some renegade rules I've invented for my personal use. I'm talking about a typesetting system widely used in the publication of academic books and papers and whose hyphenation rules have been drawn up by (or at least, in consultation with) Spanish typographers. (Interestingly, the form super-able is specifically listed in the rules-- i.e. somebody has made a conscious decision for that word (and/or suffix) to be hyphenated in that place-- it's not just a consequence of the letter combination.) So if you do see super-able in print, it will really just be because the publisher's typesetting system split it that way.
By the way, I actually do agree that it looks a bit ugly and not terribly readable (although I think that's largely true of hyphenation per se). But it is a possible hyphenation under what is a reasonably well established typesetting system; that's the bit that I find hard to square with the idea that you "can't hyphenate the word that way". Incidentally, I think the reason for abandoning the convention you mention is essentially just practical: (a) the algorithm is simpler if you don't have to consider in every possible case whether you're splitting into a word vs non-word; and (b) hyphenation is essentially going out the window nowadays, except in very restricted cases such as with very narrow columns, or places where you wrap around an irregular shape and are left with a very narrow portion of a column to fill. So iwhile something like super-able is an ugly choice if there are words either side that you could hyphenate instead, if you need to fill a narrow space and it's your only choice, it ends up less ugly (the algorithm designers decided) to split the word than have a blank line. It's not so much that the designers were in some way "illiterate"-- they were just being practical and, if anything, they were coming up with a superior solution to the average case of hyphenation than suggested by conventional rules given in grammar books such as the one you mention (which, once upon a time, may have dealt better with the average case of hyphenation at the time they were drawn up).
After all that, of course, my main point was really that, within such a hyphenation system (whether you agree with it or not), the chosen convention is not to hyphenate at the syllable boundary-- i.e. a system such as Latex will not hyphenate the word as supe-rable.
lazarus1907 said:
You can spell and hyphen anyway you want, Neil; this is a free world, and you're not going to jail for using your own spelling or anything. I don't know how much you've read in Spanish, but I've read quite a bit myself, and if I ever see super-able in a book (I hope not), I won't be able to help thinking that whoever came up with that such an ugly and foreign looking hyphenation never went to school, is "semianalfabeto", or thinks that everything should be like in English.
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You can spell and hyphen anyway you want, Neil; this is a free world, and you're not going to jail for using your own spelling or anything. I don't know how much you've read in Spanish, but I've read quite a bit myself, and if I ever see super-able in a book (I hope not), I won't be able to help thinking that whoever came up with that such an ugly and foreign looking hyphenation never went to school, is "semianalfabeto", or thinks that everything should be like in English.
That may be the rule bandied about in schools, and it may be the opinion of some typogaphers, but others certainly disagree or don't conform to that rule. The standard Spanish hyphenation rules for Latex, also drawn up by various typographers who have thought about the issue, will hyphenate super-able.
(Also, position of hyphens isn't really a yes-or-no thing -- algorithms like that used in Latex will weigh up different possibilities and hyphenate in the "optimal place". If there's a "more hyphenatable" word next to superable, then of course, that one may get picked at the expense of making word spacing suboptimal.)
lazarus1907 said:
My book? Very funny! I didn't write those rules, and you know it. They are taught at schools as part of our basic education (or at least they used to), they can be found in any decent grammar, and I don't remember the last time I saw a book that doesn't follow them. Why don't you check any decent grammar or orthography book written in Spanish? I recommend you to check something written by José Martínez de Sousa, a widely recognized expert in typography.
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Janice said:
My textbook states simply that the "uir" verbs take a "y" in the forms in which the stem is stressed. In fairness, my textbook does not try to be a comprehensive grammar but rather to introduce these words to the beginning learner.
Not only verbs in -uir: the preterite of leer should have been leió, but applying the rule, you get leyó. Roer in preterite should have been roió, but it changes to royó. And the same with verbs like oír, errar,...
Another 100% regular change is the absorption of the unstressed i followed by another vowel, after ñ or ch. Examples: gruñió changes to gruñó, and mullió changes to mulló.
I don't understand why these regular changes are not simply taught as part of the regular conjugation model, instead of giving students more and more ridiculous models of pseudo-irregular forms to memorize.
This, then, explains more clearly than my textbook why one writes "construyo, construyes, construye and construyen" but "construimos and contruís"
My textbook states simply that the "uir" verbs take a "y" in the forms in which the stem is stressed. In fairness, my textbook does not try to be a comprehensive grammar but rather to introduce these words to the beginning learner.
Nonetheless, it is nice to now read this 100% rule! ....OH look here: while writing this post, I looked up "gerundio" in the index to find another reference which states exactly this rule (and - shame on me,- way back in lesson 12 - I am on lesson 27).
I needn't translate it (it is a German textbook) because Lasarus has stated the rule in perfect English - even the reference to an unstressed "i" at the beginning of a word.
lazarus1907 said:
Actually, the so called rule is not correct, because in "leiendo" there would be no triphthong at all according to the Spanish rules of orthography and pronunciation: the first syllable would be le- and the second would -iendo. The rule goes as follows: if you have a non-stressed i between two vowels, this becomes naturally a semi-vowel, and changes to y. For example, the gerund of the verb leer adds to the root le- the ending -iendo, but instead of writing leiendo, you change the non-stressed i, getting leyendo. This is a regular change, and it works 100% of the time.
However, a stressed i between vowels, such as in oíamos, remains as it is.
Also, a non-stressed initial i followed by another vowel also changes to y. The verb cerrar changes to cierro, and similarly, errar changes to ierro, but after the modification, it changes to yerro.
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My book? Very funny! I didn't write those rules, and you know it. They are taught at schools as part of our basic education (or at least they used to), they can be found in any decent grammar, and I don't remember the last time I saw a book that doesn't follow them.
Why don't you check any decent grammar or orthography book written in Spanish? I recommend you to check something written by José Martínez de Sousa, a widely recognized expert in typography.
Well, good luck to your book.. Let's hope that all authors of hyphenation modules were reading it!
Of course, "transatlántico" is another example (syllabification probably "tran-sat-lán-ti-co").
lazarus1907 said:
I'm sorry, but you cannot hyphenate like super-able or trans-itorio, because, according to the general rules of hyphenation (from any grammar book), you have the choice of ignoring the normal syllabic division and isolate prefixes or suffixes, if and only if the rest is a word by itself and begins with a vowel, and "able" and "itorio" are not Spanish words. You can, however decide among these two: tran-satlántico
trans-atlántico
The second one would probably the most common choice by most editors, but of course, Atlántico is a word and begins with a vowel.
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I'm sorry, but you cannot hyphenate like super-able or trans-itorio, because, according to the general rules of hyphenation (from any grammar book), you have the choice of ignoring the normal syllabic division and isolate prefixes or suffixes, if and only if the rest is a word by itself and begins with a vowel, and "able" and "itorio" are not Spanish words. You can, however decide among these two:
tran-satlántico
trans-atlántico
The second one would probably the most common choice by most editors, but of course, Atlántico is a word and begins with a vowel.
There are potentially a huge number. Essentially, hyphenation conventions tend to try and preserve morphological boundaries (so e.g. superable would tend to be hyphenated super-able), whereas analyses of syllabification tend to assume that syllable onsets are maximal-- or put another way, if you're trying to decide whether a consonant belongs at the end of one syllable or the beginning of the next, put it at the beginning of the next if you can. So superable would be syllabified supe-rable, because r- is a possible syllable onset in Spanish. Similarly, transitorio would be syllabified tran-si-to-rio, because s- is a possible syllable onset, but ns- isn't. But it would tend to be hyphenated trans-itorio, because trans- is considered a "morphological unit". (Things are obviously a lot more complex than this really, but that's the basic idea.)
lazarus1907 said:
Neil Coffey said:
I think it's worth stressing that hyphens often don't fall at syllable boundaries from the point of view of various common hyphenation conventions vs common formal analyses of syllabification (though I also stress, there's no universal "right answer" to either).
Can you give us an example of a word that breaks a syllable by being hyphenated? Because you simply don't write cab-allo, cabal-lo, c-aballo or caball-o.
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James Santiago said:
Anyway, here is another site with rules and their explanations. Syllabication is not an exact science, but the rules cover the great majority of cases. http://www.avko.org/free/instructional/syllabication_rules.htm
James, one of the rule says "3. When you hyphenate a word hyphenate between syllables.", but so far, I find English syllabic division as random as its spelling: entirely unpredictable.
Also, it says
Consonant digraphs and blends are never separated. blend-ing not blen-ding.
This I find very weird, because to me, nd is not a digraph, but two letters pronounced separately, and I'd say that blen- is clearly one syllable, and -ding another, phonetically speaking. I would have never done such a division.
The Oxford Dictionary seems to use the same definition for digraph: A group of two letters expressing a simple sound of speech. If you check the pronunciation of blending, you'll see that N and D are pronounced clearly as two sounds, not one. So, why can't you split them?
Now it makes even less sense to me.
Neil Coffey said:
I think it's worth stressing that hyphens often don't fall at syllable boundaries from the point of view of various common hyphenation conventions vs common formal analyses of syllabification (though I also stress, there's no universal "right answer" to either).
Can you give us an example of a word that breaks a syllable by being hyphenated? Because you simply don't write cab-allo, cabal-lo, c-aballo or caball-o.
