From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 21:57:46 EDT
--- Tomas Frydrych <tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net>
wrote:
>
> Just a few comments; spell checking is for living
> languages, like modern Hebrew, not for dead
> languages, like biblical Hebrew.
Why?!
> There is no point in spell-checking a biblical text
> in principle, since it is not open to editing,
Well I've certainly needed it before. I've hand-typed
the first few verses of Genesis in Hebrew before and
I'm pretty sure I made plenty of mistakes that I
didn't
see. And I'm hardly a biblical scholar. I'm sure
there are many people writing all kinds of commentary
which need to use words or passages in Biblical
Hebrew.
Anyway my real point is that I don't want to
artificially introduce limitations. If something is
hard to do I'll put it off but I won't ever say
there's
no point or we'll never do it.
> and particularly because its orthography and
> vocalisation is irregular, so that a form that could
> be found in biblical Hebrew dictionary may be
> correct at one place and wrong at
> another -- like having an English dictionary that
> allows both 'color' and 'colour'. To avoid the
> squigles the user should simply mark the text as
> 'no proofing'.
That's a fine workaround for now but in the long run
I want all my software to be the best it can possibly
be. Especially my open-source software.
I think the perfect place to start for Biblical Hebrew
would be a hash file which contains exactly every word
form used in the Hebrew bible and nothing more.
I believe such things have been published in printed
form for a very long time.
> Now, I do understand that the vowel points are
> ocassionaly used in modern Hebrew as well,
> particularly in literature, when the author
> wishes to disambiguate a word. I personally do not
> think that we need to worry about this too much, the
> user can add such words to their private dictionary.
Well I'd like dictionary compilers and editors to be
able to use AbiWord some day. I find dictionaries
without vowel points pretty useless for both Hebrew
and
Arabic.
But yes the private dictionary will work very well for
now since it is Unicode whereas the spelling hashes
have to use 8-bit encoding. (I know they can use
UTF-8
but I still expect them to make a mess of
"suggestions"
in this case).
Andrew Dunbar.
> Tomas
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com
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