Hyphenation of words containing apostrophes

Question

My question is plain and simple.

Any way to hyphen words such as “Lor'themar”, “Kel'Thuzad”, etc.?

Using \hyphenation{Kel'-Thu-zad} gives me this error, for instance when compiling.

Error in hyphenation.tex (line 37): Not a letter. l.37 \hyphenation{Kel'
                      -Thu-zad} 
Letters in \hyphenation words must have \lccode>0. 
Proceed; I'll ignore the character I just read.

I'd like to define a global hyphenation, but I don't mind using a local definition for each time I want to hyphen those (a bit tedious, but that'd do the job as well).

Answer 1

As explained in my answer to Listings and Babel (with some languages) are breaking hyphenation, characters with a non zero \lccode are those that TeX considers as forming words, when hyphenation is tried.

Thus in

 ``the masters''

only the and masters are considered as words under normal settings, where ` and ' have zero \lccode. If

\lccode`\'=`\'

(which is equivalent to having 39 after =) is issued at the top level, the phrase above will have the “word”

masters''

and TeX will happily hyphenate it as

master-
s“

because this respects the rule that a hyphen must have at least three letters after it (in the English hyphenation rules there's \righthyphenmin=3) and the pattern aster5 in hyphen.tex makes this into a very good hyphenation point.

For this reason, characters with zero \lccode are not allowed in \hyphenation.

My advice is to use a macro for those apostrophes and something like

\documentclass{article}

\newcommand{\?}{'\-\nobreak\hspace{0pt}}
\hyphenation{the-mar thu-zad}


\begin{document}

\begin{minipage}{0pt}
and Lor\?themar felt that Kel\?Thuzad's controlled tone
\end{minipage}

\end{document}

where the zero width minipage is just to trigger as much hyphenation as possible.

Answer 2

Thanks to the comments I realised the are two ways to accomplish what I needed. In the examples I'll be using the word Lor'themar.

Global definition (in the preamble):

\lccode`\'=39\hyphenation{Lor'-the-mar}

Local definition (in running text):

[...] Aethas replied, and Lor'\-the\-mar felt that his controlled tone [...]

Both ways seem to be equally efficient (apparently using \lccode\=\ may have adverse effects, as pointed out by egreg). But for convenience (not only I'm writing the text in LaTeX but also making an ePub version) I'm using the first method: the global definition.