From: Joaquín Cuenca Abela (cuenca@pacaterie.u-psud.fr)
Date: Sat Sep 21 2002 - 16:48:21 EDT
On Sat, 2002-09-21 at 20:15, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> Hi Jordi,
>
> On Sat, 2002-09-21 at 13:16, Jordi Mas wrote:
>
> > In the other side, barbarisms are different. They are just wrong words. If you
> > already have a word in your language to express a concept and you use an
> > incorrect one that is a barbarism.
>
> I'm wondering about languages like French, which will come up with a
> replacement for the word "Computer" in its own tongue. How do we best
> handle that? Are all of these words now "barbarisms?" Even though
> they're in common use, *everyone* uses them, and they've been used for a
> decade now? How will Abi best handle that?
Dom, I'm not sure I fully understand your example. In French, nobody
uses "Computer". It's not like everybody is using a derived word from
"Computer", and some purist are using "ordinateur".
A more convoluted case will be Spanish. In Spain everybody uses
"ordenador" (just guess who give us that idea... :), but in latin
america everybody uses "computadora" (or "computador", it changes with
the exact country).
And the example that Jordi used, "tamany" instead of "mida"... well,
after several years studying catalan (in the south valencia zone), I've
never heard before of "mida". I've always heard "tamany", so maybe
that's another example that changes with the region, and here we have a
problem, because AFAIK the user can not specify ca-VA or ca-CA, but just
ca-ES. (I can also be blatantly wrong here, as I come from a spanish
speaking region, and not from a catalan speaking one.)
So I'm mostly with Dom here. The subject seems pretty complex and with
plenty of subtleties. If my memory is doing well, aspell used to offer
suggestions using not only the orthographic distance, but also taking in
account previous choices of the user. Maybe aspell could benefit from
better alternatives taking in account these "barbarisms", but again I
believe that a full implementation should be hard to do right.
Cheers,
-- Joaquín Cuenca Abela cuenca@pacaterie.u-psud.fr
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