Carl Spitzer wrote:
On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 17:38 +1000, Klaas Visser wrote:
On 07-Apr-07 10:05 (+1000 UTC), *Carl William Spitzer IV* posted:
Let me guess you want to translate English into Paul Hogan speak?
Isn't that a trifle colloquial for proper usage?
Then again in California we could use a talking PDA to translate
American to illegal alien for use by restaurants and hotels. Because
those businesses are too cheap to hire citizens.
You know if you could get a PDA powerful enough a talking translater
would enable travelers to avoid problems of mispronunciation.
What do you think?
CWSIV
On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 12:07 +0000, Kelvin Eldridge wrote:
Hi,
I'm the creator and maintainer of the Australian English dictionary files.
For the next two weeks I will be collecting words for the next release of the
dictionary files.
Australian English has spelling similar to Great Britain - colour,
honour, etc, and some usages that differ from American English (footpath
instead of sidewalk, boot instead of trunk, etc).
The tone of your reply seems to indicate that you don't think an
Australian English dictionary would be useful - why not?
I was just teasing about the Paul hogan speak, see Crocodile Dundee
movies. As to the utility that depends on how different Australian
English is from British or American. I can see the minor spelling
issues and that should be no problem to merely extend a standard
dictionary to allow for it unless size of the files is an issue.
Otherwise have fun.
What I wish is that we had a good talking dictionary like the one by
American Heritage which I have in both Win16 and Win32. All thats
needed is a interface.
Find a way with that and have an Australian or better an unabridged
dictionary version running of HD or DVD and you would have a lot of
takers. Its not just OOo which needs a dictionary. Mail User agents
could use improvement.
Remember English is limited to a very small number of characters and
more importantly phonemes from which all 350k words are derived. Myself
I do not know where to start.
Hi Carl,
No offence taken by me. Having a bit of fun can only be good for us;-)
On the surface I can see how you can think only minor changes are
required. However the Australian English dictionary has been an ongoing
effort over four years for me. Just to get it started required probably
up to 30% vetting of the UK dictionary. (In an ideal world this work
would have been less, as the starting dictionary would have been clean.)
Then there is the localisation. Local place names, mountains, rivers,
animals, plants, indigenous words etc etc.
In America you are also lucky. Noah Webster put in a lot of work and
standardised the spelling of a lot of words. In Australia we have
thousands of words which can be spelt in two or more ways and that leads
to lots of confusion. Eg organise/organize, focussed/focused,
bonzer/bonza, with the last example of course being colloquial.
The work I do has also produced the first prescriptive spell check
dictionary to help reduce this confusion and aids in improving
consistency in spelling. The same confusion I was faced with for
decades. Why have confusion when there really is no need.
If it works, it always looks easy;-)
The work I do is not just limited to OpenOffice.org.
If you check www.dictionary.JustLocal.com.au you will see my work
extends to the mail user agents Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Outlook, with
tools provided for Outlook Express. Other mail user agents are catered
for it they use Aspell. I also provide spell checking across all the
major browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera, plus some
commercial products where companies have assisted.
So lots of work, but there has been lots of fun too.
I'm still not certain what you want with a talking dictionary. You
already have the American Heritage dictionary and the Merriam Webster
site already does this to a certain extent online.
I'm also not certain how this relates to the Australian English dictionary.
I'm all ears though, because I have found listening to others has helped
grow the number of people I now assist. I can't be certain, but I
suspect the files I have created are now used by hundreds of thousands
of Australians (and I know of a few New Zealanders who use them too).
Let me know what you want and perhaps I can help. It may be something
others are interested in as well.
Regards,
--
Kelvin Eldridge
http://www.JustLocal.com.au
Latest versions of Australian English dictionary files for OpenOffice.org,
Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, IE, Opera and other projects.
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