The online hyphenator https://www.ushuaia.pl/hyphen/?ln=en provides different hyphenations of the word communicating depending on the variant of English: according to that program (which needn't be right), you'd hyphenate communicating as
com•mu•nic•at•ing in British English and
com•mu•ni•cat•ing in American English.
Is this true or false? If true, why the difference? If false, how should you hyphenate in AmE and BrE and why?
Neither is correct. The correct way is: com•mu•ni•ca•ting.
Hyphenation is used to break up words at syllable boundaries, so the problem is knowing where the syllable boundaries are. The rule is called the Maximal Onset Principle.
Syllables are made up of three parts: the onset, nucleus and coda. The nucleus is the vowel part, including diphthongs. The onset is consonants before the nucleus, and the coda is consonants after the nucleus. So in the word "scout", "sc" is the onset, "ou" is the nucleus, and "t" is the coda.
The maximal onset principle states that consonants are grouped in onsets as much as possible, rather than codas. In simpler terms, put as many consonants at the start of a syllable as you can, rather than the end of the previous syllable.
In the word "communicating", there's several places where it's not immediately obvious to which syllable the consonants belong, but the maximal onset principle gives one clear answer. For instance, the "n" belongs in the syllable "ni" because it can be part of the onset of the nucleus "i".
This doesn't mean all consonants go to the onset, just the ones that the language allows. Take the word "instruct", for example. Between "i" and "u", there's "nstr". In English, we can't begin a syllable with "nstr", so we look for the longest string of consonants that English does allow in an onset, which is "str". This means "instruct" syllabifies like this: in•struct.
As for the "m•m" part of "communication", there's a writing rule that in English we always separate double consonants, even though the sound belongs only to the syllable after the break.
There are other rules for hyphenating writing that cause computerized hyphenators to make mistakes, including attempting to break words at word boundaries within the word. For instance, in the word "newsletter", the maximal onset principle would break it as "new•sletter", which is obviously wrong because it breaks the word "news". The two algorithms that hyphenated "communicating" in the website you used were possibly trying to preserve the words "at" and "cat".
Hyphenation is generally not the author's responsibility, but the typesetter's. US typesetters have tended to hyphenate based on the pronunciation of syllables, and in this word would be divided as "com•mu•ni•ca•ting". British typesetters tend to follow the division of the word into prefixes and suffixes, and look to the etymology of the word. The "a" of "icating" is part of the Latin verbal ending; the "c" is part of the Latin root. So dividing into prefixes and suffixes you get "com•munic•at•ing". There is a common rule of splitting double letters when these provide a hyphenation point.
But there is a fair deal of variation in practice, in both the UK and the US. Readers are pretty tolerant and can deal with reading texts that are hyphenated the "wrong" way.
My advice would be to avoid hyphenation entirely when handwriting. Always start new lines at word endings. Allow your software to hyphenate if you are using word processing or typesetting software. I'll note that "hyphenation" is not taught at school, and children would not normally learn hyphenate manually, and would not be expected to do so. They would learn to read hyphenated texts, but this is not a skill that really needs practice.
So what should an English learner do? Don't worry. Both hyphenations above are acceptable and readable. Neither American nor British readers are going to have difficulty reading the word hyphenated in either manner. Computer algorithms for hyphenation are not perfect, but I have yet to see any example when they actually hyphenate a word so incorrectly that it causes difficulty for the reader.
It changed in the course of the years for British English. According to The Oxford spelling dictionary, Robert Edward Allen, 1986, p. 49, the British-English hyphenation is
com|mun¦ic|at|ing
A slightly newer New Oxford spelling dictionary, Maurice Waite, 2005, 3rd edition, p. 97 says
com|mu¦ni|cat¦ing
The bar | denotes a preferred division point (you can almost always divide there), and the broken bar denotes a secondary division point (e.g. for narrow columns); their exact definitions are stated in the two dictionaries.
Question: What were the reasons for the change? Is any version wrong?
