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, -- Joaqu�n Cuenca Abela [EMAIL PROTECTED]
