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 Backsteingeb�ude". 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 Stahlgeb�ude). (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
