RE: minor hyphenation issue

[Karl Berry]

1) Gerard Kuikens created, years ago, a huge set of additional patterns
for US English. As I recall, they covered all known exceptions at the
time he made them. They have been available in TeX Live as language
"usenglishmax" (among other names). As far as I know, he is still
willing to maintain it, if anyone had bugs/requests. The patterns are
(nowadays) in TL's file
texmf-dist/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/txt/hyph-en-us.pat.txt

2) Although we certainly aren't going to change the default typesetting
done by "tex" (or "latex" or "pdflatex", or, I suppose, "groff"), I see
nothing in principle that stops the addition of UTF-8/Latin-N/whatever
patterns, to be enabled in a given document. The frozenness of Knuth's
patterns, while certainly true, is not a block to moving forward.

3) Besides Liang's thesis, you may be interested in the
information/links about the current state of TeX hyphenation at
http://tug.org/tex-hyphen. Also Mojca and Arthur's paper (they are the
instigators and principal maintainers of hyph-utf8) last year about it:
http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb37-2/tb116miklavec.pdf

best,
karl