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Grammar: Part 21

A prayer to the grammar gods:

Some things are... worth...
...understanding...

Lesson forty-three: graduation

When we were young we learned the Hungarian alphabet. (Not too long ago.)
We were in Part 1:

We couldn't go deeper at the time, because:
"Hungarian hyphenation is not kindergarten stuff!"

Well they say it here too, look at that(!): XIV. Magyar Számítógépes Nyelvészeti Konferencia:
"Hungarian children learn the rules of syllabification in their early teens."

Ready to be teens, and think a bit deeper?

Not too deep.
We still believe we are invincible.

Just a bit deep.

So when writing Hungarian, if a word needs to be hyphenated to wrap around to the next line, there are rules.
There is no point in writing all the rules - they can be easily looked up on the internet.

Let's just look at general rules (of course each rule has exceptions, however let's hold off on those exceptions):

In general:

• A hyphen splits a word into its syllables
• Each syllable, if possible, starts with one and only one consonant.
• Each syllable has exactly one vowel

Now let's look at a word: "tetet". Let's look at its syllables.

So this means that tetet is split thus:
te-tet

and not split like this:
tet-et.

Ok, let's conjugate it:

Ok, let's look again at the general rules:

• A hyphen splits a word into its syllables
• Each syllable has exactly one vowel
• Each syllable, if possible, starts with one and only one consonant.

So why is it that tetet is split thus:
te-tet

and not split like this:
tet-et
?

A syllable mid-word should never start with a vowel, unless preceded by another vowel.

(There are exceptions. For example, a syllable mid-word may start with a vowel if dealing with built-in boundaries of compound words or co-verbs or foreign words. So for example, tizenegy is hyphenated to be ti-zen-egy (and not ti-ze-negy), in order to separate the meaningful unit "tizen" from the meaningful unit "egy." ... Anyone interested can look up the rules on the internet.)

So why (in general) should a syllable mid-word should never start with a vowel, unless preceded by another vowel?

Let's hazard this as a guess: because doing so runs the risk of accidently doubling the consonant right before it.

Pronouncing double consonants is a learned art. English words rarely require the pronunciation of double consonants ("bottle" is NOT pronounced "bot-tle"). Hungarian words, with few exceptions, however, require double consonants to be pronounced doubled and single consonants to be pronounced single.

Rattle off the conjugation charts for tetet and tettet. Suddenly hyphenation will begin to make sense.

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