> Will the end user (of oowriter) notice any difference whether the > Myspell/Hunspell dictionary uses affix flags or not? Is there any > added value in providing a spelling dictionary with flags, as > opposed to a flat list of word forms?
Maybe not for the end user, but sure for the developer of the dics. I have been making extensive use of affix flags in the Coptic dic. In the Coptic language even articles, pronouns and some prepositions are prefixes, i.e. written merged with the nouns/ verbs. Similar rules apply for the Arabic language. I fact it would make things even easier, if there was more than "only" twofold suffixing. cheers Moheb > For example, en_US.dic contains "man/USY" where "/U" adds un-, > "/S" adds -s, and "/Y" adds -ly. But the plural "men" is not > created by flags, but listed separately, as "men/MS". (I'm not > sure why "mans" and "mens" are OK, but English is not my native > language. "Manly" is covered by man/Y but "manly" is also listed > separately, perhaps in order to cover "unmanly".) > > As another example, the de_DE_neu.aff specifies the quite advanced > "/s" flag (77 lines of affix rules) for plurals with umlauts, such > as Buch -> Bücher, Haus -> Häuser and Dach -> Dächer. > > Apparently, the English example cannot be used to derive the basic > form (singular: man) from the plural (men), since these are listed > as two separate entries. > > Of the affix files I've looked at (da, de, en, no, sv), only the > Danish has comments for each flag. The others look more like > object code than source code. Were they converted automatically > >from older ispell affix files? Is the distribution of the derivate > without comments allowed by the licenses (GPL? LGPL?) of the > original files? Does anybody maintain .dic files manually, > knowing the flags by heart, or are .dic files always generated by > the likes of ispell's munchlist program? > > As the affix flags often do indicate plurals, genitives and other > grammatical patterns of words, it would seem natural to combine > this with grammar checking and thesaurus, but no such connection > exists with today's ispell/myspell/hunspell. For example, in the > current English thesaurus, "man" is an antonym of "woman", but > "men" is not an antonym of "women". German "Buch" has synonyms in > Lektüre, Titel, Werk, but "Bücher" and "Büchern" has no synonym. > Has any attempts been made to create a unified higher level > dictionary format, from which a spelling dictionary, hyphenation, > and thesaurus can be generated? > > > -- > Lars Aronsson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) > Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen! Ideal für Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
