On Thu, 29 Aug 2002, Eric Muller wrote:
> For my personal use, I would like to acquire electronic dictionaries,
> principally for the major European languages, with the following
> characteristics:
>
> - reputable source
>
> - "raw" datafiles accessible - I appreciate the interfaces that
> dictionary vendors may provide, but I want to be able to write my own
> code to find the data I am looking for
>
> - the wordlist is the principal aspect; I can live without definitions.
>
> - "markup" about the structure of words, for things like hyphenation,
> etc. (or from which hyphenation can be derived)
>
> - some form of frequency count would be nice
>
> For example, I'd like to compute something like: "the average French
> character occupies x bytes in UTF-8", with average defined in sync with
> the frequency count. And I'd like to compute things like spelling
> changes introduced by hyphenation in Dutch.
>
> Any pointers?
>
> Thanks,
> Eric.
Friday, August 30, 2002
Eric,
I have no sources to suggest, just a comment. The average UTF-8
length of a French word will depend to some extent on whether separate
codes are used for combining characters/diacritics or a single code for a
precomposed letter + diacritic combination. It will matter more if you
want the average length of Czech or Polish words. Fortunately Vietnamese
isn't European.
Regards,
Jim Agenbroad ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] )
"It is not true that people stop pursuing their dreams because they
grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing their dreams." Adapted
from a letter by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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