More typos

David Champion dgc at uchicago.edu
Wed Aug 20 09:29:03 CDT 2008


> Hyphenation in this case would be used to join a compound noun. As  
> 're' isn't a noun, hyphenation isn't correct. Analogous examples are  
> 'reconfigure', 'redeploy'. Because of the possibility of confusion  
> with read, maybe something like add_again is sensible?

Use "re-add", or "add [the thing] again", or even both.  The latter has
creater clarity, but is more cumbersome.  A good model would be to use
"add... again" for the first usage in a text, just to introduce the
reader to the concept, and to use "re-add" thereafter for conciseness.

In English, typically a word being modified to form a new semantic
unit goes through several stages.  With a compound noun, it begins
as two words which are taken as a single functional unit.  As the
word gains commonness or acceptance, it may be hyphenated.  Same with
prefixed verbs, or contracted nouns.  And as the hyphenated version gets
more common, the hyphen may be considered archaic.  This has happened
recently, for example, with "email".  It was first "electronic mail",
but was quickly contracted to "e-mail".  As awareness and use of the
term became nearly universal, the hyphen was allowed to fall away.

However, as Chad suggests, this is not usually done when dropping the
hyphen results in adjacent vowels, because English has no native notion
of using a diaresis/umlaut to differentiate distinct adjacent vowel
sounds from diphthongs -- English just uses the hyphen for this.

Ultimately there's no rule about how words "graduate" from one of
these stages to another.  It's descriptive (based in observed usage)
rather than prescriptive (based upon some set of agreed-upon rules),
so in order to make the transition some number of users have to use it
"incorrectly" for a while, as millions did with "email".  But because
of the vowel issue "readd" would be a bad choice for effecting change
through usage. :)

-- 
 -D.    dgc at uchicago.edu    NSIT    University of Chicago


More information about the Mercurial-devel mailing list