gregorio-project / hyphen-la

Latin ecclesiastic hyphenation patterns and resources
http://gregorio-project.github.io/hyphen-la/
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Greek words with intervocalic u/v #83

Open wehro opened 5 years ago

wehro commented 5 years ago

W. Sidney Allen states (Vox Latina, p. 42):

Unlike consonantal i, u normally occurs singly between vowels, e. g. caue. But in the Greek words Euander, Agaue, euoe, the u represents a double [w] (as in Greek), so that although the preceding vowel is short, the syllable is heavy.

I think that means that au or eu should not be treated as diphthongs in these cases. In modern spelling, it would be consequent to use v instead of u here.

I have looked up these and some similar words in the most reliable dictionaries:

As we can see, the dictionaries are far from consequent. ThLL seems always to use u in these cases, although it uses modern spelling in cases like caveo etc. The other dictionaries use varying spellings. Note also that the long vowels always marked before v contradict Allen's statement.

The problem for the hyphenation patterns is, which spellings should be supported, especially if the v spelling should be supported, even if none of the dictionaries does use it and if different hyphenations for the u and the v spelling are acceptable or necessary with respect to modern pronunciation.

The test lists contains the following hyphenations: