Re: spelling lists

From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 22:56:03 EDT

  • Next message: Rui Miguel Seabra: "Re: Updated German translation"

     --- Raphael Finkel <raphael@cs.uky.edu> wrote:
    > I want to build an Abiword spelling list for Yiddish
    > (Unicode). What tools
    > do I need in order to build it? I have a list of
    > 60K Unicode entries ready
    > to go. I use Linux.

    Hi Raphael. There may be some special problems for
    doing a Yiddish spell-checker that make it trickier
    than latin-alphabet spell-chekcers.
    Firstly, ispell and aspell (which we use for our
    spell-checking) can only handle 8-bit encodings, so
    you
    need to find an encoding which you can convert the
    Unicode to this format. I don't know enough about
    Yiddish but I do know that there is more than one
    orthography or spelling standard, so we need to be
    able
    to tell people which one it uses. Then, I believe
    some spelling standards require vowel points in
    certain places whereas in others they are always
    optional.
    First you need to find whether the words you want to
    use as the spelling word list use vowel points at all.
    Then you need to find if there is an Encoding which
    supports the vowel points - hopefully they do.
    If they do, you have to decide whether to include both
    words with and without vowel points in one dictionary.

    If you either a) don't need vowel points or b) find
    an 8-bit encoding that can handle vowel points, it
    should be identical to getting spellchecking to work
    for any other language.

    Apologies for any naive assumptions I may have made
    about Yiddish. I know what I've said does apply to
    Hebrew at least.

    Good luck!

    Andrew Dunbar.

    > Raphael Finkel

    =====
    http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com

    __________________________________________________
    Do You Yahoo!?
    Everything you'll ever need on one web page
    from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
    http://uk.my.yahoo.com



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Tue Aug 13 2002 - 22:58:40 EDT