Ar Luan 15 Lúnasa 2005 03:03 pm, scríobh Bram Moolenaar:
> I'm hoping that we can agree on a way to define compound words better.
>...
> I found an outline of a format in the online Aspell documentation.  But
> it's not finished.  Let me propose something, then we can discuss it,
> try it out and finally decide on what it's going to be.

Dear Bram,

   Would it be possible to add the ability to modify the beginning of the
second word when two words are compounded?

   The example I have in mind is from Irish (Gaelic).  Many words
in Irish can be "lenited" - this is denoted orthographically
by inserting an "h" as the second character:
"caint" (talking) -> "chaint".
An existing affix flag "S" makes this change on many many words
in the dictionary.

Now when two words are compounded, the *second* word almost 
always undergoes this change if possible:
"cúl" (back) + "caint" (talking) -> "cúlchaint" (gossip)

The same phenomenon has arisen in the past with prefixes that
aren't themselves words.  For example, the prefix "comh-" 
(like English "co-") gives
"comh" + "caint" -> "comhchaint"

Because of this, some acrobatics were required when I wrote the existing
affix file just to realize this one prefix:

PFX L   0     comh        [^bcdfgmnpst]
PFX L   b     comhbh      b
PFX L   c     comhch      c
PFX L   d     comhdh      d
PFX L   f     comhfh      f
PFX L   g     comhgh      g
PFX L   p     comhph      p
PFX L   t     comhth      t
PFX L   0     comh        s[^aeiouáéíóúlnr]
PFX L   s     comhsh      s[aeiouáéíóúlnr]

On the other hand, if I'm understanding the proposed CMP syntax correctly,
the corresponding trick wouldn't be possible since the first
letter of the trailing word couldn't be stripped.

An obvious workaround would be to specify the "trailing word" flag
only on lenited words like "chaint", but this is problematic because 
such words are already encoded using the "S" affix flag I mentioned
above.     In other words, one would have to expand out the "S" flags
first, nearly doubling the size of the word list.

-Kevin


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