Hyphens (1 Viewer)

Tiraya · Feb 15, 2018

Oh boy, do I love, and hate hyphens. Moving to America has challenged my understanding of hyphens quite a bit. Broad-leaved willowherb became broadleaf willowherb, night heron became night-heron, and so on.

I ask the following questions because these examples in particular still confuse me. I have read the IOC "rules" and they don't really answer these cases for me.

1. Tropicbird is not hyphenated, so why is storm-petrel?
2. Night-heron should be nightheron, following nighthawk, no?
3. Wood-pewee is hyphenated, but bushtit is not?
4. Wrentit, according to IOC rules, should be hyphenated. But it isn't. ???
5. Is magpie lark really magpie lark, or is it magpielark, or magpie-lark?

Can anyone help me out? I want to understand hyphens rather than ignore them. Personally I've ignored IOC and followed these 3 rules on basis of what makes the most logical sense:

Adjective adjective**+noun = first term separate, latter terms combined with no hyphen (superb fairywren)
Adjective noun+noun = first term separate, latter terms combined with hyphen (grey shrike-thrush)
Noun+noun = spaced words, no hyphens (night parrot)

Am I wrong to follow these 3 rules? If not I suppose if fairywren is combined, shouldn't stormpetrel also be combined as so? Why or why not? It looks ugly, but for consistency we can't pick and choose.

**obviously fairy itself is generally a noun, but in this case it is used as an adjective to describe the bird.

Jos Stratford · Feb 15, 2018

Silverwolf said:
. Personally I've ignored IOC and followed these 3 rules on basis of what makes the most logical sense:

Adjective adjective**+noun = first term separate, latter terms combined with no hyphen (superb fairywren)
Adjective noun+noun = first term separate, latter terms combined with hyphen (grey shrike-thrush)
Noun+noun = spaced words, no hyphens (night parrot)

Am I wrong to follow these 3 rules?

**obviously fairy itself is generally a noun, but in this case it is used as an adjective to describe the bird.

A little bit of bad news for you in your personal rules

Your last example of noun+noun is not actually a noun+noun. Similar to your reasoning for fairy, 'night' is an adjective in this case, describing the parrot. However, fairy in fairywren is not really an adjective, it is part of the compound noun

Good luck with the hyphens :-O

McMadd · Feb 15, 2018

You would like to think though that as part of the "coming together" of all the different publishing organisations that make money out of these lists they'd sort the bloody things out once and for all...

Nutcracker · Feb 15, 2018

One useful rule, followed by everyone except AOU / Clements (and sadly, occasionally, IOC):

Never capitalise after a hyphen.

Doing so just looks plain awful.

jurek · Feb 15, 2018

My feeling is that hyphens are used depending from pronounciation. Short words are brought into one (bushtit), longer ones with hyphens (night-heron), longest words are broken into two (whistling duck). Which is apparently wrong according to rules of formal English.

English needs a new name for eared-pheasants from Asia. They are frequently mis-hyphenated as brown-eared pheasant and grey-eared pheasant. Of course, the bird is brown or grey, its ears are white.

Kirk Roth · Feb 15, 2018

jurek said:
My feeling is that hyphens are used depending from pronounciation. Short words are brought into one (bushtit), longer ones with hyphens (night-heron), longest words are broken into two (whistling duck). Which is apparently wrong according to rules of formal English.

I think you've hit on it - at least in our current era. The prevalent use of hyphens in the non-ornithological world seems to be the representation of a vocal effect on paper, and that is affected by what the words themselves are. People don't type "nonornithological" but "nonverbal" seems perfectly fine both as I type it and as I sound it out through my head.

Unfortunately for some, hyphens like other aspects of language do not naturally conform to formal rules but are rather just simple language tools, to be used as the communicator sees fit. Some claim Gutenberg as the "inventor" of the hyphen, but for him it was simply a printing tool to achieve even spacing. It can also be used to clarify, associate, formalize, break words on a page, or signify how fast something is said. Like all aspects of language (think apostrophes, contractions, or word meaning itself), the use of these tools changes over time, with echoes of the past reaching us in quirks and oddities that sometimes get forgotten. Organizing all these moving parts into formal static rules is about as easy as defining taxa as species.

Tiraya · Feb 15, 2018

Jos Stratford said:
A little bit of bad news for you in your personal rules Your last example of noun+noun is not actually a noun+noun. Similar to your reasoning for fairy, 'night' is an adjective in this case, describing the parrot. However, fairy in fairywren is not really an adjective, it is part of the compound noun

Good luck with the hyphens :-O

Oh boy. Well you got me there Jos. I was actually struggling to find a suitable definition for these cases!

All I wish we can find is unity. Is it just me or is there a lot of arbitrary naming and syntax? Really, why is storm-petrel not stormpetrel while fairywren is as such, same with bushtit and wrentit and treecreeper.

Jurek I know this might be absurd but maybe brown-eared-pheasant would work :t: Joking of course, but maybe that is the answer?? I wish I knew.

Jacana · Feb 15, 2018

A general (but by no means absolute) rule that I follow is that if the name is a compound of two sort of birds then it's hyphenated. If it's a bird name and a non-bird name then it isn't. So: Hawk-Owl, Thrush-Nightingale and Peacock-Pheasant vs Storm Petrel, Night Heron, Scrub Robin.

In addition with bird-bird names, if the bird is in the family that the name suggests then you capitalise both (Hawk-Owl); if it's not then you don't capitalise the second one (Shrike-babbler). This also is the case for things like Stone-curlew, which are neither stones, nor Curlews.

As for removing a hyphen/space altogether... You're on your own!

fugl · Feb 15, 2018

Then there are “legacy” words like “antidisestablishmentarianism”. Except in some technical jargons (e.g. chemical names), there is no way that a modern coinage of that length would be hyphen(-)less.

And I agree with Nutcracker, hyphens between capitalized words are an affront to the eye and are never permissible.

MJB · Feb 15, 2018

fugl said:
And I agree with Nutcracker, hyphens between capitalized words are an affront to the eye and are never permissible.

Except that human beings are capable of rational argument, which on occasion means that affronts to the eye can, by plausible reasoning, be much reduced.

"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals." (Hamlet: Act 2, Scene 2, Page 13)

That's a high pedestal to reach and maintain - I'm with jacana's sensible and pragmatic compromise.
MJB
PS I thought it impolitic to offer a countervailing view via "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye...! (Luke 6:41)

nartreb · Feb 15, 2018

This is one of many areas where English simply refuses to behave. In general, there's a progression from phrases to hyphenation to true compounds. That last step in particular usually means the phrase no longer sounds unusual to English speakers, but there's no particular speed at which this happens.

The hyphen sometimes carries semantic meaning, but this is not reliable. The Douglas-fir is not a true fir and some authorities insist it should therefore always be hyphenated. Such a rule of hyphenation, though, is widely ignored, witness the recent IAU decision that Pluto is not a planet, but is a "dwarf planet".

fugl · Feb 15, 2018

Well, about wrangling-about-hyphens there’s obviously no end. . ..

Farnboro John · Feb 15, 2018

fugl said:
And I agree with Nutcracker, hyphens between capitalized words are an affront to the eye and are never permissible.

Except of course that there are many British examples of double-barrelled surnames that are hyphenated and both capitalised.

These days there are also many examples of children with double forenames that are hyphenated and capitalised, but these simply indicate that the parents should be taken to a vet and put to sleep (indeed, should have been before breeding).

John

fugl · Feb 15, 2018

Farnboro John said:
Except of course that there are many British examples of double-barrelled surnames that are hyphenated and both capitalised.

You’re right, of course: Claude Cattermole "Catsmeat" Potter-pirbright, for example, won’t do at all. Dto for Cyril “Barmy” Fotheringale-phipps while Algernon “Algy” Wymondham-wymondham is as bad or worse. So I’ll have to give you this one, I guess. . ..

njlarsen · Feb 16, 2018

In many ways, languages develop ...........

Niels

Tiraya · Feb 16, 2018

So this has been an interesting debate. I still wonder what is the solution when it comes to a project involving bird names from a complete region? Easier with America because of the IOC "rules", where hyphens are sort of well-founded over the years (as in we are used to night-heron, never night heron). But in another country, say Australia, it is common to see fairywren, fairy wren, fairy-wren and magpie-lark magpielark and so on over primary references. Is it possible to have a consistency in cases like this?

It seems for that, I may have to make my own rules. Pick what I want, and stick with it?

Farnboro John · Feb 16, 2018

Silverwolf said:
So this has been an interesting debate. I still wonder what is the solution when it comes to a project involving bird names from a complete region? Easier with America because of the IOC "rules", where hyphens are sort of well-founded over the years (as in we are used to night-heron, never night heron). But in another country, say Australia, it is common to see fairywren, fairy wren, fairy-wren and magpie-lark magpielark and so on over primary references. Is it possible to have a consistency in cases like this?

It seems for that, I may have to make my own rules. Pick what I want, and stick with it?

Just talk about them, don't write them down. Avoids all this bother.

John

njlarsen · Feb 16, 2018

Silverwolf said:
So this has been an interesting debate. I still wonder what is the solution when it comes to a project involving bird names from a complete region? Easier with America because of the IOC "rules", where hyphens are sort of well-founded over the years (as in we are used to night-heron, never night heron). But in another country, say Australia, it is common to see fairywren, fairy wren, fairy-wren and magpie-lark magpielark and so on over primary references. Is it possible to have a consistency in cases like this?

It seems for that, I may have to make my own rules. Pick what I want, and stick with it?

The Clements list (which actually starts with the AOU/AOS rules and committee decisions) and the IOC list both can be downloaded on the web. Choose one of them and use whatever the chosen list uses as spellings.

Niels

MJB · Feb 16, 2018

fugl said:
Algernon “Algy” Wymondham-wymondham is as bad or worse. So I’ll have to give you this one, I guess. . ..

Incidentally, pronounced 'Windam-windam'....., so as you can see, the hyphen followed by a lower cased word is absolutely essential here... or not.:eek!:
MJB

Farnboro John · Feb 16, 2018

Admittedly from Wikipedia, but makes you think:

The surname of the extinct family of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos was the quintuple-barrelled Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville.

Thank heavens they never discovered a night-heron or eared-pheasant!

John

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