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3. Text Lyrics are in should be set to the language used by your lyrics (choices are English, French, Ger-
man, Italian, Spanish and Latin); Sibelius should guess the language automatically, but if it makes a mistake, correct the setting here before proceeding Automatically syllabify ambiguous words determines what Sibelius should do when it encounters words that can be hyphenated in multiple ways (e.g. “everything” can be hyphenated as “ev-er-y-thing” or “ev’-ry-thing”). When switched on, Sibelius examines both the phrase structure of the music to which the lyrics are being added, and the phrasing of the text itself, in order to try and determine the most musically satisfying result. If this option is switched off, Sibelius will prompt you to choose the appropriate syllabification for each ambiguous word. Lyrics text style determines which text style Sibelius should use for the lyrics it adds to the score Delete existing lyrics text will remove any lyrics in the selected passage in the chosen text style before adding new lyrics; this option is useful if you find yourself using this feature successively, e.g. after fixing an error in the music or adding a slur to correct a melisma Use apostrophes to show combined syllables option tells Sibelius to show where it has chosen to combine two syllables into one for ambiguous words, e.g. if it splits “everything” into three syllables rather than four, with this option switched on it will write “ev’-ry-thing”, and with this option switched off it will write “eve-ry-thing.” It is more usual to use an apostrophe in this situation, so it is recommended to leave this option switched on. If Warn when lyrics won’t fit the music is switched on, Sibelius will prompt you if it determines that you either have too many lyrics to fit the available notes, or vice versa, and it will give you the option to proceed if you wish.
When you click OK, Sibelius will add the lyrics to the selected passage in the score. If Sibelius is unable to determine how best to deal with ambiguous words, it will prompt you to help it: the Choose Syllabification dialog will appear, showing the word in question and allowing you to choose between the different ways of hyphenating it; hover your mouse pointer over the combo box to see a tool tip that shows the word in context. You can switch on Syllabify similar words consistently to prompt Sibelius to use the same hyphenation pattern for words with similar characteristics (e.g. the same suffix). If your lyrics switch between different languages, you can add a special command to your text file that tells Sibelius where to use the hyphenation rules for another language: just put the name of the language inside curly braces, e.g. {English} or {German}. To force a word to hyphenate in a particular way, simply add the hyphens to the word or words in question in the text file containing the lyrics you want to add. In some languages, such as Spanish and Italian, it is common to elide the end of one word with the beginning of the next, treating those two syllables as one (e.g. “donde irà” in Spanish may be sung as three syllables rather than four, i.e. “don-de_i-rà”). Sibelius will do this for you automatically where appropriate.
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