I have built an ispell hash file for Yiddish/UTF8/YIVO. I will put it in http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish.utf8.hash.gz tomorrow. (I had transfer problems today.)
Here is how I decided on the various questions that Andrew Dunbar raises: > 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 used ispell's tools and let them pretend to be using an 8-bit encoding. All of UTF8 can be considered to be just bytes if you want. > that there is more than one orthography or spelling standard, so we need to > be able to tell people which one it uses. I am using the YIVO (yidishe visnshaftlekhe institutsye = Yiddish Scientific Institute) "takones far der eynhaytlekher oysleyg" = rules for uniform spelling, published around 1950, and generally accepted since then. > Some spelling standards require vowel points in certain places whereas in > others they are always optional. Vowel points are required in certain places. There are no options. > find if there is an Encoding which > supports the vowel points - hopefully they do. UTF8 supports the full range of Yiddish characters. Raphael Finkel
