Das Internetwörterbuch Merriam Webster bietet zu jedem Eintrag die Silbentrennung (AE). Ist mir eine Riesenhilfe, da sie mir auch ein Rätsel ist. Good luck!

www.m-w.com

Tausend Dank!
Die Akut-Anfragen sind damit schon gelöst!

I can't give the whole answer, because I don't know it, but I can get you half way there. Start by analyzing the word for prefixes, suffixes, and infixes, and put your initial separations there, so if in

representations

you recognize re- and -tions then you would have

re- presenta- -tions

with the middle part still unresolved, but at least, an easier puzzle to work out. If you're familiar with the 'pre-' prefix (pre-fix!) you can take this further to

re- pre- senta- -tions

still not done, but only one last piece (/senta/) to work out, and less to look up in some reference book. Hope that helps.

Dear Peter, that's what I was thinking about, but according to merriam-Webster it should be "rep·re·sen·ta·tion" ... Seems to be some kind of phonological reason rather than a morphological one?!
However - thanks a lot!

No Merriam-Webster in the world will ever make me write 'rep·re·sen·ta·tion'. I go with Peter here.

I remember once being told that you have to include all the necessary letters for the person to know how to pronounce the syllable.
Thus with the word "represent-", if you see the 2 letters "re" at the end of a line, you would automatically begin to say "ree", until you read the next syllable, then have to change it to "räpp". That is a bit silly.
Therefore you have to split the word after the "rep-", then the reader knows he has to say "räpp".
Of course this rule doesn't always prevent you reading it wrong to start with, as with the second syllable of "re-pres-sion", the last phoneme "sh" not "s".

Thus "representation" is split rep-re-sen-ta-tion --- "räpp-ree--zen... "
However: "repression" is split re-pres-sion --- "ree'präsh_n".

@Ghol:

Sorry, but I can hardly follow your thoughts.

Merriam-Webster's entry referring to the pronunciation of representation is as follows: "re(i)-pri-"zen-'tA-sh&n. Therefore it is just consequential to hyphenate after the first prefix 're'. In my dictionary (Muret-Sanders) the first hyphen is set after 're', which goes hand in hand with the pronunciation.

I tried to pronounce it your way, which sounds a bit silly, especially with the ligature 'ae'. One would never say - and besides, I never heard that -
raep'-ri-sen-tA-sh&n, but either re-..... or ri-.....

I donŽt know why M-W hyphenates it the way the entry is, but I guess this has to be a mistake. Apart from that, one normally hyphenates between two prefixes, not within one. And I guess this is consistent with prosodic-features. But I will look that up.

One final remark: I can't see any phoneme-shift regarding to your comment on respression. Whether one says 'sh' as in fashion or 's' as in soap, it doesn't change the meaning. Thus I would speak of an allomorphy.

Ghol's comments make sense, though I'd never heard that explanation before. Some more evidence for his point of view is given from these two entries chosen from the OAD differing in the pronunciation of the inital vowel:

dep.o.si.tion - n. 1. the act of deposing someone... # short e, like pet

re.po.si.tion - v. [trans.] place in a different position... # long e like Pete

OAD also divides 'represent' the way Ghol does.

I need to correct myself. Of course this is be not an allomorphy but an allophone. Sorry for that.

@Peter:

That is funny, because MW and Muret-Sanders give the following pronunciation:
Main Entry: de·po·si·tion, Pronunciation: "de-p&-'zi-sh&n, "dE-p&-....
I don't know how this 'dE' is pronounced. Perhaps it is either a lenghtening of the inital vowel or another way to stress the first syllable in deposition.
And to cause some more confusion, Muret-Sanders gives a third variant how to pronounce deposition: di-.... whis a lenghtend i as in meet.

Does this show a difference between AE and BE pronunciation or is this a general linguistic dissent?

Minus the 'be' of course...... *grrrr*

@Q: first of all, why do you use French accents over a space Ž instead of an apostrophe?????? ;-)

BTW I never said phoneme *shift*. Maybe I used the word wrongly, but I meant the unit of sound /sh/ as opposed to /s/. I was saying: you'd first read "-pres-" and then have to change it to "-presh-".

Using "räpp" with a German Umlaut to indicate the pronunciation, I did not mean "ae", but was trying to describe the same sound as your "re", being a short 'e' which is very close to a short German "ä", so that "räpp" rhymes with "step". (Hmmmm.... Maybe your browser/OS interprets a German a-umlaut = 'ä' as ligature 'ae' -- it that possible?]
Actually I think this 'ä' would be clearer for people who know what an "a-Umlaut" is, as you say yourself: "don't know how this 'dE' is pronounced." That appears to be the way they represent a long 'e' as in weed, deed, seed.
A short 'e' as in bed or said is written "de" in m-w.
The "di-" spelling is used by them to indicate the sound that rhymes with me, flea and see.

You say: "donŽt know why M-W hyphenates it the way the entry is, but I guess this has to be a mistake." Come off it. What about all the other words it treats in exactly the same way?
Microsoft Word automatically splits these words the same way.

@Peter: what do you think -- does that theory work?

@Ghol:

Did I really use French accents? They look like this: café or à la carte.
What I used is this ' sign, like the one you use when marking a genetive s.
On my screen it looks fine. I can't see any French accents.

Sorry, but ä as in Äpfel would I describe in linguistic-terms as unrounded, open, back, whereas the German e (which doesn't exist in English) as in Elefant is unrounded, half-closed, front. By no means is that close to the German ä.
But it is not worth quarreling about that. I understand what you want to point out.
I still have doubts on your theory, but as I said earlier, I will look that up. I'm sure that this topic has been discussed by several linguists.

"What about all the other words it treats in exactly the same way?"
I'm not sure about that; I haven't looked up all entries. My dictionary doesn't follow this 'rule', as I have already mentioned - and MW isn't either.

@Q: I must apologise for the accents comment, I now see it was only once in the quote I copied out of your text. Sorry.

Let me explain about the ä/e. Describing the English word in question, I wrote "being a short 'e' which is very close to a short German 'ä"'. I was obviously talking about the English short 'e', as in the first syllable of "represent", which is indeed close to the German 'ä'. But I admit it is complicated trying to describe sounds so that there is no room for doubt about what is meant.

When I wrote: "What about all the other words it treats in exactly the same way?", what I was saying, was: if you look at other entries, you will find that Merriam-Webster DOES follow the so-called 'rule'. Obviously I have only looked at a few contrasting words, but they do conform. e.g. relegate, deposit, reposition...
Your explanation of MW's following the rule with the one word we looked at above, was: "it must be a mistake". I think you ought to check it out!
In fact, I bet your dictionary does support the 'rule'. Maybe you have misunderstood what I said the 'rule' to be, as you did misread several of my other comments. Nichts für Ungut.

I do agree, though, that the issue is not worth arguing about.

Q: the pronunciation guide on M-W is given at the bottom of every definition page 'E as ea in easy'. That's a secondary pronunciation, and if you click the loudspeaker, the sound version is with the short e.

Ghol I think your theory about having sufficient letters to not flub the pronunciation makes sense and is correct. In fact, had I thought a little longer before posting, I should've realized it because I've occasionally become irritated myself when having to 'backtrack' across a line boundary to recover the correct pronunciation due to a poorly divided word.

I think it's perhaps worthwhile to recall one thing here: the issue of syllabification is something that is not part of natural language, that is, unlike phonetics, semantics, and syntax, all of which go back thousands of years to the dawn of human language, syllabification is a late artifact added after writing alphabetic languages in end-justified columns was invented (I have no idea when that was). And even then, in the early days I think they stuck hyphens pretty much anywhere.

So I tend to think of syllabification as part of epigraphy or printing (like fonts) and not really part of language. It's not something we worry about when we speak, listen, or even read unjustified text. I suppose that there's also a phonetic component to it as far as which collocations are possible and where stress can fall.

Not surprisingly, there's even a theory of it, e.g. http://www.unc.edu/~jlsmith/ling60/syllable.html though I looked carefully at this page.

...*HAVEN'T* looked carefully...

The following excerpt I found in 'Synchronic English Linguistics", Meyer et al.:

"The syllable is an important phonological unit above phoneme level, which was - similarly to the word - neglected for a long time, because it was not definable in sufficiently unambigious terms. However, many phonological rules are most elegantly described with reference to syllable structure, so that the phonological reality of the syllable is now undisputed."

Hi Q: yes, I don't doubt that, I also found some references, including the one I mentioned. But I wonder whether these phonological definitions of 'syllable' really coincide with the hyphenation definition of a 'syllable' or not.

It would be interesting if someone could come up with a reference that deals with both of them. Are they the same?