Automated Hyphenation of Church Slavonic Text by Computer

The problem of automated word hyphenation by computer in the TeX typesetting system was first tackled for the English language in 1983 by F. Liang. His algorithm, however, still has not been applied to Church Slavonic texts encoded in Unicode. Yet there is a need to be able to hyphenate Church Slavonic text by computer, both in typesetting scholarly works and in editions of liturgical texts. In the present article, the authors formulate rules for syllable breaking and word hyphenation for modern Church Slavonic and present the hyphenation algorithm developed by Liang. The authors describe the procedure used to generate the hyphenation patterns with the help of a new application, created by the authors, and offer methods and criteria for evaluating the efficiency of the patterns. The newly generated patterns have been packaged by the authors, and this package allows users to automatically hyphenate Church Slavonic text both in the TeX typesetting system (and derivative programs), and in popular word processing and page layout software.