Re: [Aspell-user] Using more than one language

[traverso]

Making aspell work with two languages is difficult, because different
languages have different rules to decide what is a word. For example,
in English "aaa'bbb" is one word, while in German it is two words
("aaa" and "bbb"). The only solution that I know requires to use
aspell in list mode, piping the output of "aspell list --lang=en" into
"aspell list --lang=de". The result is, more or less, the words that are
neither English nor German.

But the converse (first lang=de then lang=en) gives a different result
because of the differences on word rules: "isn't" (that would be
accepted by --lang=en) is parsed by lang=de as "isn" ("t" is
discarded, since words should have at least 2 letters) and listed as
bad, and is then rejected by lang=en too.

This might be solved with enchant, that forces a uniform word parsing
rule, depending only on unicode character class. In this way one may
also mix alphabets, e.g. English and Russian or Greek. 

If moreover you don't want only to have the bad words listed, but also
to have suggestions of the correct spelling, the situation is even
more involved: if a word is rejected, do you want suggestions in
English or in German, or both? Or depending on context? 

Carlo Traverso