Hyphen in the context of "Hyphenated ethnicity"

An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and emphasis.

Most national and international languages have an established writing system that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language. These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g. would and should); they can also reflect deliberate efforts to introduce variability for the sake of national identity, as seen in Noah Webster's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences between American and British spelling (e.g. honor and honour).

In typography, line length is the width of a block of typeset text, usually measured in units of length like inches or points or in characters per line (in which case it is a measure). A block of text or paragraph has a maximum line length that fits a determined design. If the lines are too short then the text becomes disjointed; if they are too long, the content loses rhythm as the reader searches for the start of each line.

Line length is determined by typographic parameters based on a formal grid and template with several goals in mind: balance and function for fit and readability with a sensitivity to aesthetic style in typography. Typographers adjust line length to aid legibility or copy fit. Text can be flush left and ragged right, flush right and ragged left, or justified where all lines are of equal length. In a ragged right setting, line lengths vary to create a ragged right edge. Sometimes this can be visually satisfying. For justified and ragged right settings typographers can adjust line length to avoid unwanted hyphens, rivers of white space, and orphaned words/characters at the end of lines (e.g., "The", "I", "He", "We").

English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language, allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. English's orthography includes norms for spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.

As with the orthographies of most other world languages, written English is broadly standardised. This standardisation began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century. However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every phoneme, and most letters also represent multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context.

A street name is an identifying name given to a street or road. In toponymic terminology, names of streets and roads are referred to as odonyms or hodonyms (from Ancient Greek ὁδός hodós 'road', and ὄνυμα ónuma 'name', i.e., the Doric and Aeolic form of ὄνομα ónoma 'name'). The street name usually forms part of the address (though addresses in some parts of the world, notably most of Japan, make no reference to street names). Buildings are often given numbers along the street to further help identify them. Odonymy is the study of road names.

Names are often given in a two-part form: an individual name known as the specific, and an indicator of the type of street, known as the generic. Examples are "Main Road", "Fleet Street" and "Park Avenue". The type of street stated, however, can sometimes be misleading: a street named "Park Avenue" need not have the characteristics of an avenue in the generic sense. Some street names have only one element, such as "The Beeches" or "Boulevard". In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was common when writing a two-part street name (especially in Britain) to link the two parts with a hyphen and not capitalise the generic (e.g. Broad-street, London-road). This practice has now died out.

In this context, the term "the hyphen" was a metonymical reference to this kind of ethnicity descriptor, and "dropping the hyphen" referred to full integration into the American identity. Some contemporary critics of this concept, such as Randolph Bourne in his criticism of the Preparedness Movement, accused America's White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite of hypocrisy by showing the same divided loyalty in pushing for the "Special Relationship" that they refused to tolerate in others. Other contemporaries, like Bishop John Joseph Frederick Otto Zardetti, argued eloquently that there is no contradiction between American patriotism and loyalty to one's ancestral culture, religion, and heritage language. In a 1916 letter to the Minneapolis Journal, one Minnesota German-American suggested that his own people would willingly "abandon the hyphen", but only if "Anglo-Americans" did so first.

Personal names in Hong Kong reflect the co-official status of Cantonese and English in Hong Kong. A total of 25.8% of Hongkongers have English given names as part of their legal names; a further 38.3% of Hongkongers go by English given names even though those are not part of their legal names. The two figures add up to a total of 64.1% of Hongkongers having English names, according to a survey of 2049 respondents in 2015.

For example, a person who has Kuo as his surname, Chi Yung as his Cantonese given name and Peter as his legal English given name, would have his name rendered as either "KUO Chi Yung Peter" or "KUO Chi Yung, Peter" (with comma) on court papers, in the format of "Surname + Cantonese given name + optional comma + English given name", though non-court commentaries might render his name as Peter Kuo Chi-yung (with hyphen) or Peter Kuo.

In morphology and syntax, a clitic (/ˈklɪtɪk/ KLIT-ik, backformed from Greek ἐγκλιτικός enklitikós "leaning" or "enclitic") is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host. A clitic is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the form of affixes, but the distribution of function words.

Clitics can belong to any grammatical category, although they are commonly pronouns, determiners, or adpositions. Note that orthography is not always a good guide for distinguishing clitics from affixes: clitics may be written as separate words, but sometimes they are joined to the word they depend on (like the Latin clitic -que, meaning "and") or separated by special characters such as hyphens or apostrophes (like the English clitic 's in "it's" for "it has" or "it is").