[Lexicog] OpenOffice spellchecker?

[Mike Maxwell]

lengosi wrote:
> The language in question is Solomon Islands Pijin. A 'standardised
> spelling' was recently decided upon. SI Pijin has a transitivising
> suffix conditioned by the vowel(s) in the stem (-Vm; so -am, -em, -im
> [I'm not sure if -om or -um are used]). 

Whether this would be a problem depends on how frequent it is.  I would 
guess that it's not very frequent, i.e. that it would not be out of the 
question to simply list all the transitivized forms (in addition to 
their base forms).

I'm not sure what you mean by
> 'free compounding' but compounds are not uncommon, e.g.:
> 
> bele 'belly' + ran 'run' -> beleran 'diarrhoea

Again, whether that's a problem depends on how common it is.  (If the 
two parts of the compound were written separately, like 'dog biscuit', 
it would not be a problem at all.)

> I guess both of those things could complicate things, eh? 

Not necessarily a lot.  It sounds like you don't have much (if any) 
inflectional morphology, and that's what can cause problems.  If that's 
correct, then a listing approach would work.  (And as another respondent 
mentioned, there are tools that allow you to work with morphology; but 
it does have the potential of being messy in some languages, 
particularly where there's allomorphy.)

> I hadn't
> considered parsing things; I just figured it would be a case of
> entering all the wordforms and that would be it. 

In the case of this language, it may be.  As long as you're willing to 
enter a *lot* of wordforms, it may be OK.  You may need to enter a lot 
of proper nouns that you wouldn't normally enter in a dictionary; but 
that is doable.
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu

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