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

[Linus Feiten]

Hi Carlo,

thanks for the quick reply. I understand now that what I asked for is
not that simple.

The ideal for me would be that one language (say German) is the "main
language" of the document, so I would want aspell to detect all words
not in the de_de standard dictionary and ask me how to correct them;
UNLESS the respective word is also found in the en_gb dictionary. If a
word is found in neither, I don't mind if the suggestions are always
from the "main language".

But as this is probably not possible, I will add the english passages to
my .aspell.de.pws file.

Or how does the piping work which you suggested?

Thanks, Linus



On 05.07.2016 16:42, address@hidden wrote:
> 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
>