> >ObI18n: I have heard that in Italian it is acceptable to hyphenate
> >using "_" (underscore) almost anywhere, without regard to either
> >pronunciation or etymology. Is this true?
>
> I think I have seen this in Portuguese in Brazil too, or something similar.
> I think that they restart on the next line with the same character, but I
> may be wrong. Please correct me.
>
> Alain LaBonté
> Québec
>
The following is from a friend, Fernando Cabral, in Brasil:
Well, the underscore has never been officially accepted in Portuguese.
What happened was that in Brazil the ragged style was not accepted
at all (this has been changing, slowly), so every typist had to be quite
careful when filling the line until the rightmost column.
Two tricks were developed to make things easier for them: the first
one was to use an underscore instead of a hyphen to indicate a word
was broken. The second one (ugly, horrible, unpalatable) was to
use a ' (plica - or single quote, as you call it) in the last column. So,
a text would look like this
Meu nome é fernando Ca- (1)
bral. Estou descrevendo
como os datilógrafos es_ (2)
crevem um texto alinha-
do à direita. Outra for_ (2)
ma de alinha é usar a ' (3)
plica para completar.
(1) correct
(2) hyphen replaced by underscore. It should be placed
under the (s) or (r) in the lines above.
(3) horrible - line filled with a single quote
I hope the justification works in your video.
Form (1) is the only one correct and official. Form (2) has been
extensively used by typist. Now they are not in use any more because the
computers are everywhere. Form (3) had always been considered anathema
although some people insisted in using it.
The bottom-line is: the only character that can be used to indicate that a
word has been split is a hyphen.
Some people have advocated that if a compound word is split in the hyphen,
than it should be repeated in the next line:
palavra-chave
palavra-
-chave
Acceptable, no doubt, but I have never seen it anywhere.
Now, where can I split a word? There is a very simple rule: only between
syllables. We don't pay atention to etymology but to pronunciation. Each
part must be pronounceable by itself.
Some people may have dificulties in words like Paraguai (Paraguay) because
they can't see clearly how the "guai" is pronounced. There is only one
syllable there, but since there are many vowels, they tend to think each
letter represents one vowel..
As to using the character in the next line, it only occurs a) when a word
is already hyphenated (as said above) or when we have a digraph like "rr"
and "ss". One stay in the previous line, the next goes to the next line.
Again, the rule is the same, this way of splitting does not change it.
--
Fernando Cabral Padrao iX Sistemas Abertos
mailto:fernando@pix.com.br http://www.pix.com.br
mailto:Pix@Pix.com.br
Fone: +55 61 321-2433 Fax: +55 61 225-3082
15º 45' 04.9" S 47º 49' 58.6" W
19º 37' 57.0" S 45º 17' 13.6" W
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT