Hyphenation

I am reading Simon Winchester's The Crack in the Edge of the World, about (mostly) the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He talks about plate tectonics and so on in the early chapters - in chapter 4, where I am, he's talking about his desire to drive from one end of the North American Plate to the other. He's somewhat foiled in this plan, of course, by the fact that the eastern end is out in the Atlantic, but there is Iceland, so he can go there, anyway.

The eastern end of the plate is in a valley in Iceland near Reykjavík, a place Winchester had visited back in the early 1960s, before the whole plate tectonic thing really caught on. But he's pretty sure that he had, in fact, crossed onto the Eurasian plate, and possibly even had his "tourist photo" of himself with a foot on each, such as he wants to take in California... All well and good, and in fact his explanations of the geology are lucid and at times lyrical. He's an excellent writer.

The thing is (no pun intended), that he went to this spot in Iceland not because of the geology, but the human history. It's the site of the Althing, the original Icelandic parliament, most probably the first in the world. And that's the word that tripped me.

I vaguely remembered, the first time he mentioned in, that Althing meant "all thing". But the next time he mentioned it, two lines on in the next sentence, I was uncertain of my memory: was that a folk etymology or even just something I'd made up back in school? Because that next mention hyphenated the word as "Alth-ing".

One of my peeves with Russian (and other post-Soviet states) is their cavalier placement of hyphens. Lots of Soviet/Russia papers didn't hyphenate, which could lead to some words being stretched out to ridiculous extremes, two spaces between each letter, in order to justify the text. But worse (for a non-native speaker) is that the ones that did hyphenate simply popped the hyphen in wherever the edge of the column showed up. This often obscured the syllable boundaries, and could very easily confuse attempts to analyze the morphology of an unfamiliar - or worse, semifamiliar - word: what's that prefix? Is it по-страдянська, built off the root for "suffer" with "po", a prefix meaning "for a while" or possibly perfectivizing? Why, no: it's пост-радянська, built of the root for "council" and the prefix "post" - post-Soviet, in fact. Who the heck hypenates in the middle of a prefix?

But that notion - that hyphens fall on syllable or morpheme boundaries - is rapidly becoming a thing of the past as copy-editors are replaced by software. So Althing is hyphenated, not Al-thing but Alth-ing, and I momentarily adjust my pronunciation and wonder who "Alth" was. Until, before the paragraph ends, I hit the two place names - the town of Thingvellir and the volcanic lake Thingvallavatn - and it becomes obvious that "thing" is indeed the noun, whole and entire.

I see from a trip to Wikipedia that Alþingi is indeed the "all thing", þing in Old Norse, Old English, and Icelandic or ting in other modern Scandinavian languages being the word for "assembly" or "parliament". The location is Þingvellir, the "assembly fields", and the lake Þingvallavatn. I don't know Icelandic, and don't have time to go hunting, but I'm going to guess that means "assembly valley water". It's beautiful, by the way.