I often work with texts from the 17- to 1800s that (in addition to now obsolete words) contain familiar words in slightly different spelling. The language of these texts, and of the ones I'm writing, is one in which a lot of hyphenation has to be done, due to the high average length of its words (German). To complicate matters further, it's also a language in which hyphenation is regulated a lot more strictly than in, say, English. [Which doesn't mean that what follows is a problem restricted to German.]
In *TeX, this results in a problem: when hyphenating a word that comes in an archaic spelling, *TeX has no choice but to apply the same rules it applies everywhere else, as it has no way of telling if the spelling at hand is archaic or not. Quite often, this results in a hyphenation that is wrong by both archaic and contemporary German standards.
A classic example:
A lot of German words used to be spelled with a th where today there's only a t. Such as Teil (=part), which was Theil until that th went out of fashion, and even became eliminated from the official dictionaries around 1900 -- probably because of it's redundancy, as the h didn't make a difference in sound, unlike in English. Today, only few German words retain that Th, such as Thron (=throne), as they didn't want to offend the emperor when they officially changed the spelling rules.
The reason this is important to *TeX is that in today's German, with that kind of th eliminated, the letters t and h hardly ever constitute one sound. So if we encounter a modern German word with a th in it, which happens quite often, it will usually be a word composed of two or more syllables (or words) -- the first of which ending with a t, the second starting with an h. As in, say, flathead in English. But sound is the very basis of German hyphenation practice, and *TeX knows that. So in *TeX, the archaic spelling of theil in beurtheilen (=to judge), will result in the hyphenation be-urt-heil-en, which is unacceptable because, in this case, the t and the h belong together in terms of both sound and meaning.
My questions are: has this ever been addressed somehow? I haven't been able to find anything suggesting that is has. Do we have other options except manual word lists using \hyphenation{...}? ...Which is particularly tedious in German because every potentially critical word may come with a dozen of versions for different genders, cases, etc.
hyphenation{...}for texts with lots of foreign words. I didn't put any words in there until I was finished writing the whole thing and actually saw where the problems occurred. If you write these words very often, you could just have your own little hyphenation "library", kind of like your .bib file that grows over time. – Anke Mar 19 '13 at 15:35\hyphenation{...}, I don't envy the people who did the typesetting. I might try to contact the publisher and get in touch with those people just to ask them about this... – Nils L Mar 19 '13 at 15:41