EEK! Sorry about missing this, in a pile of "possible-spam". Just in case it's still of any help:
(Jonathan, if this doesn't go to the list because I'm not subscribed, can you forward it, please.) On Friday 04 November 2005 15:02, Jonathan Riddell wrote: > On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 02:58:46PM +0000, Norman Silverstone wrote: > > I would like to find the Welsh dictionary that can be down loaded and > > used with openoffice.org2. Can anyone help please. I'm not sure if the spell-checker stuff (which includes a thesaurus, I think) is available as a separate download. According to the Projects page on Meddal, www.meddal.com, there should be a Welsh OOo2 version available at: ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/localization/OpenOffice.org/devel/680/SRC680_m128/Build-1 or somewhere similar (try navigating around the dir-tree). They tend to be a little vague on locations for latest versions, and they focus more on Microsoft Windows anyway, but you could contact them directly if you need some guidance on OOo2 or the Welsh spell-checker. You may be thinking of the proprietary product from UWB's Canolfan Bedwyr, which works with both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. I believe Meddal (which is linked to Canolfan Bedwyr) sells Cysgliad for around £50, which is a combination of CySill (a spellchecker and grammar-checker) and CysGair (a dictionary), both of which run on Microsoft Windows. They are also reputed to run on WINE, minus a few features, but I have never done this myself. The Meddal projects page suggests that CySill is being ported to Linux to run natively - again, you would need to ask them directly for more info. Neither app (or the wordlists behind them) is released under a free license. There are various Welsh wordlists/dictionaries on the web, of varying size and accuracy, and under different licenses. I am currently working with Kevin Scannell (http://borel.slu.edu/gramadoir/index.html) on a comprehensive GPLed spelling/grammar-checker + dictionary, based on his 95m-word corpus of Welsh. We have completed the first step towards this (see http://www.konjugator.org.uk, which covers the inflected verb-forms for over 4,000 common verbs), and we are now working towards a first run at the grammar-checker, based on an initial tranche of around 4,000 non-verb words. These will be made available on the proof-of-concept "dictionary server" at http://www.dotmon.com/aurfa when it goes "live" (under a different name, Eurfa, using a different db, PostgreSQL, with a different layout, etc etc) in (hopefully) a couple of months. Further words will be added to that as we go. It's going to take at least another 12 months to get a reasonably comprehensive grammar-checking/spell-checking/dictionary offering, although we'll have working versions before that. Unfortunately, since none of the publicly-funded lexical material in Welsh seems to be available under a free license, we have to waste our time reinventing the wheel. If anyone on the list (or anyone they know) would like to help this effort, get in touch - the work is trivial, but tedious, and involves tagging lists of words (ie noun, adjective, masculine, etc) and (preferably) giving them a meaning. The more people that help with this gruntwork, the faster we'll get something GPLed that we CAN all slice and dice. Once we have a reasonably comprehensive free database of words, it could be used for all sorts of other things (eg text to speech, machine translation), the db can be extended to allow citation additions, etc, etc. -- Pob hwyl / Best wishes Kevin Donnelly www.kyfieithu.co.uk - Meddalwedd Rhydd yn Gymraeg www.cymrux.org.uk - Linux Cymraeg ar un CD -- ubuntu-uk mailing list ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
