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?
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]
