Mojca Miklavec (2010-05-24 02:16):
Dear Claudio,
Thanks a lot for your prompt reply.
On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 00:39, Claudio Beccari wrote:
Dear Mojca, no proper Italian word ends in ch (this digraph in normal Italian words is pronunced as k, not as č or ć). Nevertheless there are a number of surnames dating back to the old times (150 years ago) when North East Italy was under Austro-Hungarian ruling, when Istrian names, mainly Croatian and Slovenian, where transliterated in such a way that the tipical patronimic ending -ič or -ić (I don't know the exact spelling in Latin letters of the Croatian/Slovenian names) was transliterated for the Empire bureaucracy with -ich.
Thanks a lot for some more insight. I admit that I didn't know the details (I should be ashamed) and in my area they were more radical with surname changes (mine was Michelazzi and I think that most surnames here were "properly Romanized", for example Filipčič -> Filippi, so again no problems with hyphenation :) :) :).
This spelling remained when North East Italy and Istria were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy at the end of WW1. After WW2 most of Istria returned mainly to Croatia and a small part to Slovenia, but the Slovenians and Croatians that had moved the NE Italy and had become Italian citizens maintained their surnames with the Austro-Hungarian spelling.
When I prepared the hyphen patterns for Italian ad Latin I did think to this particular spelling, but I concluded that it was not so important; I was wrong, and I apologize.
There's no need to apologize. First, there's an "infinite" number of foreign names, so that one simply cannot get all of them right. I guess that Lju-bl-ja-na is not properly hyphenated either (Lu-bia-na is ok), but in my opinion it's a valid argument that one should change the language when writing foreign names if they are to be hyphenated properly. I can also easily imagine Slovenian patterns that would hyphenate: Fis-cher, Aac-hen, Go-ethe when not knowing that those letters represent a single "letter"/sound in foreign words.
Second, I have no idea, but I think it was a pure coincidence that the "problem" reported by Rogutės Sparnuotos is the same as that for surnames of a group of people on North-East (I think that the name in question comes from Russia with translitaration done by English). On the other hand if it's just a tiny pattern that solves them all ...
Thank you Mojca and Claudio for your replies. Mojca has guessed correctly: I merely noticed that the surname Manovich is hyphenated wrongly in the three languages I've tested. And I don't mind using \hyphenation{} or switching language for foreign names. I don't know how hyphenation patterns are made, so I was surprised to see the main rule of at least Latin/Italian/Lithuanian hyphenation broken (a syllable must contain a vowel). From your explanations it seems that hyphenation patterns are kind of case-by-case rules, so this problem is not suprising, since no common words end with '-ch' in these languages. Wonder if I'll find a maintainer of the Lithuanian patterns... -- -- Rogutės Sparnuotos