Maybe the key to compund words is in the hyphen. Languages with many compound words also frequently use a special form of hyphenation. In English, one example of this case would be "wooden and brick buildings", which in German is written "Holz- und Backsteingebäude". Note that this hyphen has nothing to do with line breaks. This kind of hyphen most often appears before "and" or "or", or (in lists) before the comma (Holz-, Backstein- und Stahlgebäude). (There are a few more cases, e.g. "wooden rather than brick buildings", where "rather than" takes the place of "and".)
In compound words where a glue letter is used, the glue letter appears before the hyphen. In compound words where a special form of the first word is used, this special form appears before the hyphen even though it would not be allowed as a word by it self. In Swedish, a typicaly nound (such as "girl") has eight different forms: flicka - singular, nominative, indefinite = girl flickan - singular, nominative, definite = the girl flickas - singular, genitive, indefinite = girl's flickans - singular, genitive, definite = the girl's flickor - plural, nominative, indefinite = girls flickorna - plural, nominative, definite = the girls flickors - plural, genitive, indefinie = girls' flickornas - plural, genitive, definite = the girls' Added to this, however, is the form used in compound words: flick- e.g. flick-cykel (girl's bicycle), flick-aktig (girl-ish). A shop can advertise new models of "flick- och pojkcyklar" (girls' and boys' bicycles). To cover Swedish (and Danish and Norwegian, and probably German), it would be sufficient to distinguish the hyphenated form (flick-) as a legal word of its own and the only legal prefix for compound words. Thus, the typical noun would have nine different forms rather than eight. Just like English "sheep" (plural: sheep), there are many words in these languages where some of the nine forms coincide. In many cases, the hyphenated form coincide with the singular-nominative-indefinite form (often called "the basic form"). Still, when adding a word to the dictionary, a form with nine fields would be generally applicable for Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. In the old aspell dictionary format (all words listed), it would suffice to list the nine forms: flicka flickas flickan flickans flickor flickors flickorna flickornas flick- and the "flick-" form could be freely used as a prefix in compound words. Any word could be used as a suffix in compund words. Could we have this support for "dictionary words ending in hyphen" implemented? It would be a great help to designing better dictionaries for these languages. -- Lars Aronsson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/ _______________________________________________ Aspell-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/aspell-devel
